13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A remarkable journey through troubled lands, August 15, 2010
While the book's subtitle boasts, "One Man's Amazing Journey...", a cliched line that probably should be forbidden from any future use, it is nonetheless quite accurate. Tracing the waters of the Nile from Uganda to Egypt, Morrison brings us on a journey not only across thousands of miles of Africa but also through a vast diversity of peoples and their rich and often troubled history. Weaving recent and historical events with the story of his own journey he provides an unique window onto a part of the world all too easily and often ignored. Furthermore, he casts light onto the diverse forces at play behind the conflicts that occasionally make headlines in West newspapers. What many often portray in simplistic terms as strife between Christianity and Islam, Morrison exposes as complex and fluid allegiances and schisms. Often these are less about religious differences and more about the dynamics between the wealthy and poor, those in power and those outside, competing tribes and families, and other fault lines.
The book's core however is really a travelogue, and it moves at a swift and compelling pace. The first half of the book focused largely on the interplay between Morrison and a long-time friend who has joined him on the first leg of the journey. Their procession up the Nile in their small boat delves into their personal histories, the author's work as a journalist stringer, his friend's easy life working in a resort in the United States and frequent trips to the bottom of a bottle. Unable to get a visa into Sudan, and burnt-out from the oppressive heat and relentless insects, his friend leaves Morrison midway into the narrative. Once alone, Morrison spends more time examining the people he meets, the history of the places he visits, and on his own reactions to the situations he encounters.
The narration is occasionally gritty, making the rugged, unpredictable, and often sad lives of the people he meets tangible. Sometimes this tangibility is off-putting, reducing people to the mere the functions of their bodies. More often however the gritty realism of the situation stands in contrast to these people's humble perseverance. Simple dichotomies, between good and bad, friends and enemies are turned on their heads when presumed enemies of friends are gracious and welcoming.
"Life in extremity is difficult to explain-things happen and people don't know why they are happening. Some events were fortunate and others were disastrous and that's how it went."
There are no simple answers in the book. The alliances he examines are constantly reshaped and reevaluated. The landscape similarly is in constant flux, changed by logging, droughts, and streams of garbage. Massive dams threaten rich farmland and traditional ways of life while bringing much needed electricity and development to impoverished towns and cities. This book raises questions, answers a few of them, and will leave a lasting impression.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Well-written book, but misleading title., July 8, 2011
While the book itself is a fine narrative about a man's journey through Uganda, Sudan and Egypt, one is led to expect it will be traveled by boat down the Nile. That expectation is given in the both the title and in the very beginning chapter as the author, Morrison, outlines, more than once, his plan to boat down the Nile beginning from Lake Victoria, the Nile's origin, to the Egyptian city of Rosetta where the river spills into the Mediterranean. It even seems like the majority of the trip will be spent with his friend Schon, who adds a lot of humor to the book. Yet after only about a week of rowing on a boat they purchased from a friend and a few days spent in a small village for a respite, both Schon and the boat are gone, and apparently so are all of Morrison's plans to journey down the Nile.
The rest of the book is about Morrison making his way north on anything but a boat. When he isn't on mostly undependable buses, he's encountering and recording the people of Uganda and Sudan who have been affected by the catastrophic, decades-long war and by the equally catastrophic presence of the big oil companies that forcibly destroy entire villages to make way for oil refineries. His interviews with these people are both heart-breaking and hopeful, but it took me until page 186 before it dawned on me that Morrison was never getting back on a boat again. Why did he change his mind? And why does he never tell us that he has abandoned his original plans? The rest of the book is still an interesting read, but it was a hard slog finishing it once I realized Morrison was not delivering on his promised beginning.
I'm giving the book three stars because of Morrison's excellent writing, but I do feel a little tricked by the title and will read other people's reviews before I read any of his future books.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Book Review by Hugh Pope of a revelatory, sometimes harrowing journey from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean, August 14, 2010
"Longest River, Wide Adventure: A revelatory, sometimes harrowing journey from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean". Book Review, By Hugh Pope, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, BOOKSHELF, Saturday, AUGUST 14, 2010, page W8.
When Dan Morrison began a 3,600-mile road-and-river journey down the length of the Nile River, he started at Lake Victoria in Uganda. As he reports in "The Black Nile," his account of the grueling trip, he was led to a rooming house on an island and shown a "six-by-seven windowless cell." The ceiling was "a layer cake of plastic, tree branches, more plastic and corrugated metal, all covered by a moss of dusty cobwebs. A red plastic basin of dirty water sat near the door; a foam mattress occupied half the floor." The walls were painted "an optimistic blue," and he was similarly full of hope: "It's perfect," he told his host.
The windowless cell turns out to be one of the nicer places he stays on the trip through Uganda, Sudan and Egypt to the Nile's terminus in the Mediterranean. This is hard-core African travel: trying to sleep on flop-house floors, struggling through thigh-sucking holes in treacherous beds of matted hyacinth and papyrus, enduring the maddening frustrations of broken-down bureaucracies, and coping with the long silences and sudden terrors of bush wars.
Mr. Morrison's trip is more alongside the river than on it. The Nile's beguiling line on the map has not been a through-route for many decades. The collapse of colonial empires, wars and the failings of modern states have made several stretches virtual no-go zones for outsiders except missionaries and a few stubborn Cairo-to-the-Cape adventurers--some of whom pay for their romantic dreams with their lives.
Travel along the river has rarely been easy, except for the post-World War II era of flying boats, and the colonial way-stations are now only marked by the hulks of a few old river steamers, sunk and rusting at their moorings. Sensibly, therefore, Mr. Morrison doesn't pretend that he will float down the Nile like some satellite phone-equipped Huck Finn. His quest, he says, is to bind together and make better sense of a region mostly known for its many dead ends--the ancient land of the Nubians steadily being submerged behind dams, or the vast, mysteriously burning Sudanese swamps of the Sudd. Mr. Morrison is also a writer in search of material: In an early mission statement, he declares himself "tired of struggling for crumbs of piecework from a fast-shrinking roster of newspapers and magazines. The hustle made me feel small. I needed to do something big."
Finishing the trip was certainly an achievement, and "The Black Nile"--a title never explained, perhaps chosen both to sound ominous and to illustrate Mr. Morrison's preference for the river's origins in Black Africa--is a cautionary tale for would-be travelers in rough territory about the need for preparation, patience, humor and friendship. The harder the going for Mr. Morrison, the more expressive his writing. He describes the "visual tinnitus" of flat waters and swamp plants. He starts the day with muscled arms that are "coiled pythons" but after long hours of paddling are turned into "useless sleeves of cement." He rides in a Land Cruiser madly driven on "invisible currents of wet paste." A truck ride in Sudan is intensely comic, recounted by the author with slow-motion precision as the gear-shift breaks off and the resourceful driver puts his foot on the clutch and opens up the under-floor transmission so that he can still change gears--with a screwdriver.
Dangers, amusing road-trip predicaments and well-turned phrases compensate for the book's lack of an over-arching argument. They also temper the exasperation the reader might begin to feel with the repetitive reality of putting up with stifling bus rides, plodding in search of cheap hotels and seeking out the happy hours where international-aid workers seek solace in unhappy lands. Mr. Morrison offers a nod of respect for normal people and settled states in the Nile region--Egypt's Aswan ferry feels like a homecoming to civilization, for instance--but he gives them little space.
The great Nile culture of Egypt is too well-known for his taste; it warrants just one of 10 chapters. A boatman named Fony offers him his felucca to ride a stretch from Aswan to Luxor, but on learning that the only people plying the river are tourists, Mr. Morrison prefers a second-class rail car "to avoid the wordy wake of Gustave Flaubert, Florence Nightingale and William Golding."
His own accounts of Egypt's ancient sites or tense backwaters of the Islamist insurgency are workmanlike but perfunctory. He scorns Luxor's development-minded city fathers as being interested in "emulating the Luxor casino in Las Vegas." A vendor selling pharaonic fakes who describes modernization's crushing of old ways is depicted as work-shy and implicitly mocked for his expensive-looking wristwatch.
Instead, pride of place goes to backwaters like Malakal, Juba or Jinja, which even readers familiar with the region will have to keep turning back to find on the book's maps. We're told in a loving chapter and a half that Malakal, a Nile-side settlement in Sudan, is an earth-tracked tipping point between Africa and Arabia, which both sides of the north-south conflict take turns looting.
Mr. Morrison wears his journalistic experience lightly--he sets out with a tourist map so poor and out of date that, he discovers, it puts towns on the wrong side of national borders. But his reporting background, which includes writing for Newsday and National Geographic News, allows him to step back for some deft backhanded analysis. He notes, for instance, that Egypt's crumbling inertia makes the entire country feel like a "slow-decaying element."
His heart is clearly in the upper reaches of the Nile, in Uganda and Sudan, which he finds "dynamic, changing" and which afford him an opportunity to explain how the "madmen" and "dreadlocked child soldiers" of the insurgent Lord's Resistance Army use calculated mayhem to get their way. Since 1987, these apocalyptic Christian-tribal guerrillas have ranged between Uganda, south Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mr. Morrison gets through territory partly controlled by the group, but not without a heart-in-throat moment when he reads that 40 travelers were murdered on a road he had just driven down.
The book is at its best in Sudan, describing a country torn between the dividing lines of many Nile worlds: Muslim and Christian, desert and jungle, oil wealth and poverty, Arab and African. Mr. Morrison shows how hard it will be after years of war and famine to reintegrate the south with the north, or for the south to govern itself as an inclusive, coherent state. He finds an occasional ray of hope--people seem surprisingly ready to let bygones be bygones, as when he has to hunt hard in Malakal for any physical or political damage caused by street battles a few months before. But a sense of foreboding is more common. He meets a Sudanese aid official who tells him: "A girl child here has a nine times better chance of dying in childbirth than of finishing primary school."
"The Black Nile" is not so much about the river as it is about the lands where it flows. Mr. Morrison travels mostly by minivan, jeep or truck. On the Nile itself, he rides through southern Sudan in a Norwegian aid group's raft, bristling with soldiers and weapons in case of attack from forces opposed to the Sudan's 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. He boards a ferry to voyage down Lake Nasser, the long lake formed in the 1960s by the late Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser's Aswan High Dam. And early in the trip, accompanied for a while by a childhood friend, Schon Bryan, Mr. Morrison paddles a canoe on the river. But the two never open Mr. Bryan's bag of fishing rods.
Even if he wasn't often wet with more than perspiration, Mr. Morrison does pay ample attention to the Nile's troubles as a waterway. The problems begin at its source, where the over-fished Lake Victoria is increasingly clogged with hyacinth, which has to be mechanically hauled out. Three decades ago, the author tells us, fish were abundant and many of them five feet long; Mr. Morrison sees fishermen making do with undersize 15-inchers.
One Ugandan "Nilometer" measuring the river's ever-varying level shows the river below the lowest recordable mark. Demands on the Nile's bounty can only grow as tributary states above Egypt and Sudan-- Uganda and Ethiopia in particular--are making new demands for water as they seek to develop their own agriculture. The author's clear-eyed asides illustrate the conflicts of interest over various countries' needs for power-generating, flood-controlling dams. At the site of Sudan's new Merowe Dam, "cement trucks churned on the tarmac, men walked with hard-work swaggers, and--whatever the serious human rights issues, the forced displacement, the lack of environmental review, the destruction of farmland, the arrest and torture of opponents--I had to admit the thing was a sight, big and impressive and cool."
Above all, Mr. Morrison's peppery anecdotes, his refreshing honesty and his ability to show how Africans view their difficulties save "The Black Nile" from being simply a memoir of an author's self-prescribed endurance test. Instead, the book gives us a compelling portrait of life along the Nile--from lonely fishing communities on Lake Victoria to the cacophonous collisions of Cairo. Mr. Morrison's more discouraging encounters also quietly pay tribute to triumphs of the human spirit. Mr. Bryan, the author's companion and verbal sparring partner for the first third of the account, later writes to him: "It's good to be desperate once in a while. Gives you an appreciation of the looks on people's faces when they're desperate and you're not."
--Mr. Pope is the author, most recently, of "Dining with al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East" (Thomas Dunne).
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