Mary Kingsley's 1897 classic, Travels in West Africa, has been recently reprinted and is worth picking up. It details her trips through Gabon in the 1890s, including sailing up the Ogooué River, slogging through the rainforest and gathering specimens for a natural history museum.Caroline Alexander's One Dry Season retraces Kingsley's steps nearly a century later.African Silences, by Peter Matthiessen, focuses on his journeys through Gabon and other parts of western Africa.