“Morrison is an agreeable raconteur, and he’s skilled at conjuring the menacing disorder of a continent dump-trucked in the Class VI whitewater of post-colonial commerce . . . The cumulative near-misses, the chronic money shortage and the moving stories have a huge impact by the time Morrison reaches Rosetta in Egypt . . . A memorable romp.”
More Reviews!
* “A masterful narrative of investigative reportage, travel writing, and contemporary history.” – The Daily Beast
* The Black Nile “combines wit with deep reporting…Getting in and out of dangerous locations is clearly Morrison’s forte.” – BusinessWeek
* “Captures the sun-baked, hallucinatory aura that slow boat travel can induce…Excels in bringing the place, politics and history of this fragile region alive.” – The Boston Globe
* The Black Nile “avoids the evangelical zeal and naïve prescriptions other Africa books fall victim to . . . Morrison teeters dangerously close to gunfights, disease, and run-ins with the authorities while relying on former rebels, proto-entrepreneurs, and crooked bureaucrats to get him through.” – Outside
* “Adventure is only half the story in this marvelous book, and maybe the lesser half…A beautifully-written tale of an American on a journey to find out who else is out there, what they’re thinking, why they do what they do, and hey, check out that sunset with the cranes flying low across the horizon.” – Tom Robbins, the Village Voice
* “There’s enough grist in this excellent travelogue to craft a dozen killer Microkhan posts.” – Brendan Koerner, Microkhan.com
* “If you’re weary of cliched newsbites, misery memoirs and exoticised adventurism, and want more insight than disaster reporting or parched analyses can offer, this is a refreshing relief.” – Peter Verney, Sudan Update
The Black Nile featured on Apple’s iPad
Starting today, The Black Nile will be featured as a Book of the Week on Apple’s iBookstore, available to users of the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. There are millions of these devices out there, though I’ve no idea how many people use them to buy and read books. I just saw my first iPad this weekend and I’ve got to say it looks really cool. It’s easy to see the allure of the iPad, Kindle, Nook, and other e-readers, but I think I’ll be sticking with dead trees for the time being. It’s hard to scribble in the margins of an electronic ink screen.
If, like me, you still prefer hard copies to hardware, you can order a physical edition of The Black Nile from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Powell’s, and your local independent bookstore.
The Black Nile reviewed in the Wall Street Journal
Please check out this great review by Hugh Pope in the weekend Wall Street Journal. Here’s the kicker:
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.”
The Black Nile “highly recommended” by Library Journal
“Morrison’s narrative combines reporting and travelog in a way that brings readers to this most unlikely destination, a place of complexity, tension, struggle, and pain, where shreds of tradition and community are still visible.
“Verdict: Morrison’s account transcends the travel genre to provide authentic and timely information on a complicated part of the world. Highly recommended.”—Melissa Stearns, Library Journal
Stories That Ring True: The Black Nile
Part travelogue, part crazy adventure tale, part political reportage: Veteran foreign correspondent Morrison and a buddy build a boat and paddle up the Nile River through Uganda, Sudan and Egypt. Morrison’s African river journey is a paradoxical mixture of awe-inspiring discoveries, eye-opening human interactions and perilous escapes. — Chuck Leddy, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune
What makes “War” so good?
It’s been days since I finished tearing through WAR, the new book by Sebastian Junger, and I still still can’t figure out what makes it so good.
Avast!
Recent articles on book piracy.
In Peru, from Granta.
On the Internet, from The Millions.
And in India and Bangladesh. Plenty of piracy in Pakistan too. And why wouldn’t there be? Pakistan has a poor selection of books and they’re pretty expensive by local standards. Same in Bangladesh.
Can’t publishers in Latin America and South Asia produce swift and inexpensive editions to compete with the pirates? That’s what movie distributors have done, selling cheap dvds of first-run films in Russia, and south and central Asia to beat the pirates to the punch.
Want to know how your country’s black economy compares with its neighbors? Check out Havocsope’s online database of the global black market. They follow it all – flesh, drugs, software, movies and books.
What does any of this have to do with Sudan’s historic elections? Nothing. But I hope to have a piece that subject published very soon.
Five Books on the Nile
Here’s my interview with Jessica Mudditt of the excellent Five Books. Continue reading “Five Books on the Nile”