Category: Books & Authors

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Praise for The Black Nile

From a “nomad who pursues every form of transportation imaginable to follow Africa’s longest river,” The Black Nile is “an evocative piece of reporting…a portrait of a fractured country just one spark away from a renewal of hostilities.” –Joshua Hammer, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Beautifully written. A masterful narrative of investigative reportage, travel writing, and contemporary history. . . . The Black Nile is all at once thrilling, sad, and—most of all—thoughtful. —The Daily Beast

Dan Morrison takes the reader on an incredible journey in The Black Nile. Weaving together intense travel writing and history, he has produced a supremely entertaining work, and also an important one. —David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z

Part On the Road, part Fear and Loathing in Africa, Dan Morrison takes us with him on his journey down the Nile–teaching us, by example, to be explorers of both the world and ourselves. —Kevin Sites, author of In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars

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When You Have to Drink the Water

A version of this post first appeared at National Geographic, and references my piece, Grunge on the Ganges, at The New York Times’ Latitude blog.

Varanasi, India — A couple years ago, one of India’s leading industrial houses announced a revolutionary new household filter that would for the first time bring affordable, safe drinking water to millions of homes. The Tata Swach combines the inexpensive carbon of burnt rice husks with silver nano-particles to kill and remove deadly microbes including cholera, E coli, and the rotavirus.

The Swach doesn’t need electricity or running water. Unlike some filters sold in the United States, the Swatch’s filter bulb cuts off the flow of water when it’s exhausted, meaning it’s impossible to drink unclean water that’s passed through a spent filter. (There’s no risk in drinking unfiltered water in New York or Denver, but it’s a different story in India, where waterborne diseases kill as many as half a million children each year.)

And it’s hugely affordable: The unit costs less than $20 and monthly filter replacements are just $7.

More than a million of these filters have been sold since 2009, and it’s not hard to imagine the public health benefits that will follow. More Indian companies are jumping into the low-cost filter business, which could push prices even lower.

This Indian success story, however, can also be seen as a thin bit of cover for the country’s scandalously poor public services. Continue reading “When You Have to Drink the Water”

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Amazon Subprime

In the back of your mind you always knew this is where those great Amazon discounts came from: Desperate workers, including pregnant women, passing out in stifling 110-degree warehouses, some of them required to sort or pack a different item every 30 seconds over a 10-hour shift.

The Allentown Morning call, a small newspaper in the Tribune chain that has been pummeled at least as bad as its better-known sisters, has a depressing and revealing look at life inside an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. It will make you pause next time your mouse hovers above Amazon’s “Buy Now” button. Continue reading “Amazon Subprime”

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Revolution on the Nile

In just eight days a new country, the Republic of South Sudan, will be born. It’s a huge step – but not the last step – in a 55-years-and-counting struggle for dignity and self-determination.

The south’s departure from Sudan has been as troubled as its union, with the recent fighting in Southern Kordofan and Abyei, as well as continuing insurgencies by southern renegades including George Athor and Peter Gadet. The Lord’s Resistance Army, too, remains active in the western part of the new country.

These are only the most obvious and immediate challenges faced by the southern people. Southern Sudan’s leaders, its people, and its nascent institutions will have to struggle mightily to prevent their new state from resembling the old Sudan in its approach to human rights, inclusivity, opportunity, and rule of law.

None of this should take away from the gigantic achievement that southern Independence represents. Millions died and millions more were made homeless, and endured famine, captivity and fear to get to July 9: A delicious and hugely challenging Year One. Democracy entails the right of the people and their representatives to make mistakes, to take responsibility for those errors (to “own” them, in the current parlance) and make corrections. It won’t be at all easy. But it’s a great, historic moment.

On July 5, Penguin Books will publish Revolution on the Nile, my new Afterword to The Black Nile, as an “e-special” available on the Kindle, the Nook, and Apple’s iPad, iPhone, and iTouch, as well as other e-readers. Revolution on the Nile updates The Black Nile with an account of south Sudan’s January freedom referendum, squashed attempts at public protest in northern Sudan, and the electrifying revolt against Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

Continue reading “Revolution on the Nile”

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Gratified in Gotham

I’m very pleased that The Black Nile has been named one of the Village Voice’s Best Books of 2010, joining the likes of Patti Smith, Milan Kundera, Jennifer Egan, and The Anthology of Rap. This comes on the heels of a swell December 5 write-up by Joshua Hammer in The New York Times Sunday Book Review.

Visa officials permitting, I’ll be back in Sudan next month, covering the January 9 referendum for an obscure online journal.

Until then, Happy Holidays. (That’s The Black Nile‘s paperback cover image, by the way.)

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Sudan: A Legend Predicts the Fall

Mohammed Wardi, the legendary Sudanese crooner, has joined the pessimistic chorus predicting a weak and battered Sudan after next month’s southern secession vote.

In a recent interview with the Al Ahdath newspaper in Khartoum, translated by the Sudan Votes website, Wardi says “the current unity [of Sudan] is nothing but a lie and it is not attractive.”

Do you mean that we are living on borrowed time?

We do not even have borrowed time. I am really worried about what will come later. Oil and borders are not the only issues to worry about; there is also the future of Darfur, the East and the North. Eventually, Sudan will turn into dub-districts.

As I recounted in this 2007 article, Wardi is beloved in Sudan and across the Sahel region for incorporating diverse melodies and rhythms into his songs. He’s been imprisoned and exiled for his stands against Sudan’s various dictators, and he was by far the most prominent northern member of  Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. (A more evocative account of my meeting with Wardi — complete with a pair of caged fauns and a fast-flowing bottle of Chivas — can be found in Chapter Nine of The Black Nile.)

Continue reading “Sudan: A Legend Predicts the Fall”

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A Glowing Review in The Washington Post

Travel writer Tahir Shah has published a glowing review of The Black Nile in the Washington Post. It’s especially gratifying coming from an author who knows first-hand the joys, burrs, and dangers of off-the-grid travel and reporting. Here’s an excerpt:

Morrison’s experience as a journalist shines through, as does his use of humor, which frames subjects of utter horror. These include intertribal conflict, pestilence, and the dams and deforestation that have destroyed swaths of East Africa’s ancient habitat. In the southern Sudanese town of Juba, Schon cooked up his last plates of oily spaghetti and came clean about not wanting to go on, especially since “on” was into the “malarial tinderbox” of the Sudd swampland, where “the war wasn’t quite finished in Upper Nile state — antagonistic militias stewed in camps while their leaders grappled for political power.” After his childhood buddy leaves, Morrison continues alone, and, now that the author can turn his full attention to the landscape around him, the travelogue steps up a notch. What’s impressive is how well he describes without judging. The Africa he depicts is a place where tribal rivalry complements religious and political friction; where illness, disease and utter poverty shape the lives of the majority, who lack the safety nets that so often catch Westerners when we fall.

As the journey progresses, it becomes much less of a whimsical jaunt and much more of a hard-edged report. This is Morrison at his best, lean and hungry in wild wastelands of Africa’s Sahel. His description of the Sudanese capital is memorable : “A dense static of orange grit came screaming from the desert; it filled the sky and trapped Khartoum’s eight million souls in a suffocating and radiant silica heat.”

Click here to buy your copy of The Black Nile.

And check out Tahir Shah’s most recent new book, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams.