Category: Books & Authors

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Lonely Planet Gives ‘The Black Nile’ 4.5 Stars

Travel guide author Steve Waters, writing at the Lonely Planet website, has this to say:

The Black Nile offers a fascinating and harrowing look at a country that continually makes headlines for all the wrong reasons. Morrison does his best to explain the historical events, tribal intricacies, external pressures and internal tensions that haunt Sudan today. Ok, not every traveller can flash their press card and jump a UN chopper, but then they normally wouldn’t end up under the bed sheltering from a firefight between local militias either. Morrison’s trip through Sudan becomes a quest for understanding; an attempt to unearth the truth behind his experiences as he interviews rebel leaders and local headmen, academics and taxi drivers, archaeologists and tour guides, all the time cadging his way a little further downstream.

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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

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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.

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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.”

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Egypt’s Battle to Control the Nile Waters

My newest piece, on the struggle for control of the Nile. Here’s the lead:

I was standing inside a colonial-era circuit house in a sprawling, malarial city called Malakal in southern Sudan. I had come to see a man about a river, but the man, an Egyptian hydrologist, wasn’t talking.

“It is forbidden,” he said solemnly, “to speak of the Nile.”

I pointed towards the window. “But it’s right there,” I said. This was, after all, a measuring station of the Egyptian water ministry, one of several it maintained in Sudan and Uganda to track the volume of the world’s longest river.

The hydrologist didn’t need to look out the window. He knew where the Nile was–he’d devoted his life to its study. But there was nothing he could say to a stranger about something so important to his nation’s survival. I might have had better luck inquiring about Tehran’s nuclear program.

You can read the whole article here, and check out other great writing on the environment at the NatGeo News Watch blog.

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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

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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

Continue reading “Stories That Ring True: The Black Nile”