The Nile [Hardcover]

Professor Robert O. Collins (Author), Robert O. Collins (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0300097646 | ISBN-13: 978-0300097641 | Publication Date: November 1, 2002 | Edition: First Edition

The Nile is the longest river in the world. In its route from the Lake Plateau of East Africa to the Mediterranean, the Nile flows for more than 4000 miles through nine countries: Tanzania, Kenya, Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Uganda, the Sudan and Egypt. The river begins in volcanoes and mountains with glacial snows and ends in arid deserts. Throughout history, the banks of the Nile have been home to many peoples, from Bantu cultivators, Nilotic herdsmen, and Ethiopians in their highlands to the Sudanese, Nubians and Egyptians on the plains below. No other river in the world has embraced such human diversity. But the huge and varied populations that have thrived on the waters of the Nile have also exerted extraordinary pressures on the river and its environment. From the early canals dug by the pharaohs to the building of the Aswan High Dam in 1971, civilizations have struggled to tame the Nile and control its resources. In this text, Robert Collins charts this dynamic interplay between man and nature in chronicling the past, present and future of this great river.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The Nile is many rivers. The longest river in the world, it has its source in glacial mountains, and along its over 4000-mile journey it flows through rain forests, grasslands, and deserts. No less diverse are the human societies that, across centuries, have depended absolutely upon the Nile for their existence. Collins (history, emeritus, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara), who has written several books on African history, explores the many facets of the Nile by describing its many distinct sections in chapters such as "The Lake Plateau," "The Blue Nile," "The Egyptian Nile and Its Delta," etc. The discussion is primarily historical, with particular emphasis on the adventures and explorations of Europeans. Equally intriguing are the final chapters, which examine the monumental engineering projects that have been undertaken to control the Nile and provide fresh water to parched regions. Paramount among these projects was the construction of the Aswan High Dam in 1971, and its story alone is an eco/political/ technological epic as large as the Nile itself. For academic and larger public library history and ecological collections.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Back Cover

"A compelling interdisciplinary study of Africa's longest, most intensely studied, and most fabled river. Collins writes about the Nile with the same verve as the pharaohs did several millennia ago." -Robert Tignor, Princeton University

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 260 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (November 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300097646
• ISBN-13: 978-0300097641
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,408,371 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great read, January 15, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Nile (Hardcover)

By Robert I. Rotberg

The life-giving Nile of lower Egypt trickles first from two springs in Burundi and Rwanda and then meanders 4,238 miles as the White Nile through great equatorial lakes; loses itself in tangled and difficult swamps; tortuously emerges to run freely toward its confluence with the much more powerful, if shorter, Blue Nile from Ethiopia; and then flows over cataracts and dams through the great desert to the Mediterranean Sea.

Over five millenniums, the nutrient- and silt-laden Nile floodwaters enabled agriculture and civilization to flourish all along its lower reaches. When the annual summer flood failed, however, the northern Sudan and all of classical and modern Egypt suffered hideously.

Collins links the dark ages of dynastic Egypt and the successes of invading outsiders to those sometimes prolonged periods when the Nile withheld its renewing gift. In turn, those dry spells reflected shifts in the rainfall patterns of equatorial Africa and highland Ethiopia, not - as the Egyptians always feared - to the manipulative scheming of Ethiopian monarchs or African chieftains.

There were many efforts to measure the flows of the Nile, and then to harness it effectively. Taming the Nile, the quixotic goal of administrators from early times, led to the first small dams, and in the early 20th century to dams in the Sudan. President Gamal Abdel Nasser's Aswan High Dam of 1970, with its 300-mile lake and its ancillary dam at Roseires in the Sudan, were together intended to regulate the river forever, smoothing out the years of high and low water. But the mighty Nile refused to capitulate, and the impoundment of its waters has led to great silting and weakening of the dams, the impoverishment of Egyptian agriculture, unexpected disease, and unanticipated economic and social consternation.

Collins's seamless biography captures the soul of a river that is both a result of and a continuing influence upon Africa's geology, climate, history, peoples, economy, and politics. Collins roams over the 2 million-square-mile basin of the Nile - the smaller rivers, the large and tiny lakes, and the glacier-capped mountain ranges - and writes movingly of the glory and challenges faced by the immense cascade of water as it makes its way over myriad waterfalls and past pumping stations, villages, towns, and cities to its ultimate destination. He also captures the trials and triumphs of the Nile's sometimes human- assisted passage through the Sudd - a vast eddying swamp-like mass of lagoons and channels that long defied explorers and entrepreneurs as they attempted to follow the White Nile south into equatorial regions.

Counterintuitively, more of the merged waters of the Nile come from the Blue branch, not the much longer and more tortuous White system. The Blue starts higher than the White, at 9,000 feet, and then rushes into shallow Lake Tana. From shores ringed by Coptic Christian monasteries, the Blue carves a great arc through the lava dikes and sandstone plateaus of western Ethiopia, strengthened by three significant and many minor tributaries until it leaves the highlands and crosses into the Sudan as a source of regular refreshment.

As in any great biography, there are diversions off the main channel. Collins swoops readers into the Baro Salient, that riverine mapmaking mistake that thrusts Ethiopia into the southern Sudan, where commerce coursed clandestinely across borders. He takes us on a fascinating search for 15-foot canaries - not in John Williams' standard "Field Guide to the Birds of East Africa" - high up in the Mountains of the Moon (the Ruwenzori Range). And he supplies unexpected facts. For instance, as mighty as the Nile may be, its volume of fresh water delivered to the Mediterranean is only 2 percent of the total of the Amazon River and 15 percent of that of the Mississippi River. For much of its 160 million-year history, the Nile emptied into the Indian Ocean; only in comparatively recent geological times has it flowed north.

This is an easy book to read and to like. Yet there are occasional anachronisms, where sketches of people or places forsake the findings of modern linguistic and ethnological scholarship, and repetition of pet phrases or factoids. But the book's big flaw is the fault of the publisher: The quality and clarity of the maps and photographs are inadequate for a study as important as this panoramic biography of a pulsing river.

 Robert I. Rotberg directs Harvard's Program on Intrastate Conflict and is president of the World Peace Foundation.

from the January 09, 2003 edition - ...

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great maps and a riveting narrative, November 18, 2002

By 

Robert J. Stern "Bobdadbob" (Dallas, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Nile (Hardcover)

There are a lot of great books on the Nile; Emil Ludwig's classic and Alan Moorehead's come to mind. This is another, updated version, that fills in a lot of the blanks left by the earlier books. It is well written and up-to-date. The emphasis is on politics and history but the author also appreciates the physical wonder that is the Nile. The author spends a lot of time talking about this place and that place, but the book is full of excellent maps to guide the geographically perplexed. It is a good read for the adventurous as well as those interested in the challenges facing modern Africa.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great maps and a riveting narrative, November 18, 2002

By 

Robert J. Stern "Bobdadbob" (Dallas, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Nile (Hardcover)

There are a lot of great books on the Nile; Emil Ludwig's classic and Alan Whitehead's come to mind. This is another, updated version, that fills in a lot of the blanks left by the earlier books. It is well written and up-to-date. The emphasis is on politics and history but the author also appreciates the physical wonder that is the Nile. The author spends a lot of time talking about this place and that place, but the book is full of excellent maps to guide the geographically perplexed. It is a good read for the adventurous as well as those interested in the challenges facing modern Africa.