About this item
A spectacular modern-day adventure along the Nile River from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea With news of tenuous peace in Sudan, foreign correspondent Dan Morrison bought a plank-board boat, summoned a childhood friend who'd never been off American soil and set out from Uganda, paddling the White Nile on a quest to reach Cairo-a trip that tyranny and war had made impossible for decades. Morrison's chronicle is a mashup of travel narrative and reportage, packed with flights into the frightful and the absurd. Through river mud that engulfs him and burning marshlands that darken the sky, he tracks the snarl of commonalities and conflicts that bleed across the Nile valley, bringing to life the waters that connect the hardscrabble fishing villages of Lake Victoria to the floating Cairo nightclubs where headscarved mothers are entertained by gyrating male dancers. In between are places and lives invisible to cable news and opinion blogs: a hidden oil war that has erased entire towns, secret dams that will flood still more and contested borderlands where acts of compassion and ingenuity defy appalling hardship and waste of life. As Morrison dodges every imaginable hazard, from militia gunfire to squalls of sand, his mishaps unfold in strange harmony with the breathtaking range of individuals he meets along the way. Relaying the voices of Sudanese freedom fighters and escaped Ugandan sex slaves, desert tribesmen and Egyptian tomb raiders, The Black Nile culminates in a visceral understanding of one of the world's most elusive hotspots, where millions strive to claw their way from war and poverty to something better-if only they could agree what that something is, whom to share it with, and how to get there. With the propulsive force of a thriller, The Black Nile is rife with humor, humanity and fervid insight-an unparalleled portrait of a complex territory in profound transition.
About the Author
As a writer and correspondent I have barbequed with the Latin Kings street gang, shared tea and almonds with a sponsor of the Taliban, and chewed knotty stroganoff in the crumbling desert palace of a fading Maharaja. (``There is only one explanation for the rapid expansion of the British Empire,'' he told me, pointing with a manicured finger to his dining room's cracked and vaulted ceiling. ``Divine providence. '' A jungle's worth of tatty stuffed tigers looked on dubiously. ) I was at Newsday's New York City edition for seven years covering the bombast of the Rudolph Giuliani era. I later moved to South Asia, where my topics ranged from militancy in Pakistan and Afghanistan to the dying art of the hand-painted Bollywood movie poster. I reported from Egypt, Sudan, Uganda and Libya between 2005 and 2008, covering the conflict in Darfur, the looming struggle for oil in southern Sudan, Libya's bizarre attempt at glasnost, and the effects of climate change on the Nile ecosystem. During that time I traveled down the length of the White Nile, from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea, through the entirely of Uganda, Sudan and Egypt. That six-month journey is the basis for my first book, THE BLACK NILE, which is slated for an August release in hardcover by Viking Penguin. I am based in South Asia now, where I contribute articles on science and the environment to National Geographic News, a website of the National Geographic Society, and research my next book.
