In my and many, many others' view, he is an insane maniac who seems determined to die in very bad ways, and have a bad time while he's on his way to doing it. The book is called Facing the Congo.
Towards the beginning he describes a scene in downtown Kinshasa, a place where I lived and went to school for three years, from 1970 - 73. If there were ever a golden age for what some wag quipped was "A deep hole in central Africa that is exactly the shape of Zaïre" (Zaïre was the former name for what is now called the DRC -- Democratic Republic of the Congo. The dictator, Mobutu, who created that hole in the exact shape of the DRC over a period of years, is gone now, but Kinshasa remains) that was it.
The guy who wrote this book had made a decision to basically canoe down the Congo river alone, following in the wake of H.M. Stanley, the explorer.
Tayler was in Kinshasa 1n 1995, while Mobutu was still nominally in power, but long ago removed to a palace in the jungle, where he spent his billions and nurtured his prostate cancer.
But here is Tayler's descripton of a place I used to know very well and even hung out in with friends at modern cafés -- the center of Kinshasa, Boulevard du 20 juin. I remembered it as a modern, bustling city, but Tayler says this, in a view from a taxi:
"Ahead rose the modern apartments and office towers I had seen from across the river. Beneath them, on Boulevard du 30 Juin, between the palms, faded billboards promoted Miki-skin-lightening cream and Sahabair, Primus beer and Scibé-Airlift, all with cheery, 1950s-style painted advertisements. Men -- little more than skeletons in rags -- wandered down sun-bleached, trashed-out side streets, stirring up ash-colored dust. In the garbage heaps, which were still smoldering from last evening, starvelings scavenged on their knees, or twitched or groaned, prostrate in the offal and debris, too weak to move.
"I could not stomach the sight and turned away.
"Dust, decay, crazed men in uniforms, starvelings and cripples -- it all hit me and I nearly broke. I felt nausea rising within me; pity and revulsion and shock swamped me and kept at bay the fear I had thought I would feel.
"Although I had expected to see poverty, I had no idea it would upset me so thoroughly, so viscerally."
I had no idea that things that I myself witnessed could deteriorate into the hell Tayler witnessed. Let this be a warning to all . . . if it can happen to the largest country in Africa, who can't it happen to?
I highly recommend that you watch this video, which will illustrate very clearly to you that there are many Hells right here on Earth:
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