Boswell records that Samuel Johnson had read Daniel Defoe and “allowed a considerable share of merit to a man, who, bred a tradesman, had written so variously and so well.” The comment points to a truth about Defoe: a Protestant through and through, he had an amazingly catholic mind. It is, indeed, hard to think of another writer of imaginative literature who, in his journalism and pamphleteering, took on such an extraordinary range of subjects: finance, trade, religion, politics, travel, medicine, science, architecture, farming, horticulture, morals, and manners, among others.

The British journalist Richard West aims to pay tribute to this range of interests in his entertaining and refreshing biography, Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures.¹ For West, Defoe’s story became compelling not because of a lingering childhood attachment to Robinson Crusoe, which he confesses to having first read at an advanced age—as was Defoe when he wrote it. Rather, as an enthusiastic traveler and an adept of travel writing, West was inspired and delighted by Defoe’s Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain. Researching the present book, West also discovered that all of Defoe’s weekly journalism from the broadsheet Review, which he founded, has been preserved in facsimile. What West found there was a breadth of absorbing prose that makes the case for acclaiming Defoe a great journalist, writing cleverly, informatively, and passionately about every subject of the day and anticipating every device—some, to be sure, not altogether welcome—of