Word: moorehead
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...Blue Nile, by Alan Moorehead. In this rich historic tapestry (1791-1962), the author has woven with equal skill the look of the great river itself and the lives of the great figures - rapacious explorers, splendid Mamelukes, the invading Emperor Napoleon - who struggled along its shores...
...heat bred serpents and other monsters out of the mud of the Nile. With The Blue Nile, this ancient river of mystery has now been made the object of two studies that employ all the modern arts of research to dispel myths and muddy misconceptions. Alan Moorehead, an extraordinary journalist-turned-historian who examined the history of one of the river's sources in The White Nile, tells in his latest book what succeeds the great civilizations-Egyptian and Greek-that rose and fell with the Blue Nile as its annual floods gave life to the narrow green ribbon...
...morality play that sets up timely echoes in the modern imagination. At a time when the white man is leaving Africa, it details and dramatizes the manner of his arrival on that vast continent. As history goes, it is a short story and, indeed, a very disquieting one. What Moorehead calls the European reconnaissance of the Nile did not begin until the closing years of the 18th century. "For well over a thousand years the great civilization of ancient Egypt had been forgotten and its writings were a closed book, nor did there appear any bright prospects for the future...
...Blue Nile, at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. Bruce's intrusion into the "nightmarish fantasy of Ethiopian affairs," where he casually joined as it suited him one or another of the chronic little local wars, is a historic comedy with tragic forebodings. Bruce himself was an arrogant braggart, and Moorehead has great fun with his efforts to discredit the stories of missionaries who had been there before...
Bruce was only a traveler; Napoleon was very much more. With Napoleon, Moorehead uses what might be merely historical pageant to dramatize the impact of European technology on African barbarity. It was as a young (29) revolutionary general that Bonaparte went to Egypt. Although the outcome is known, Moorehead's superb narrative of the French adventure has the quality of suspense. Napoleon brought a small force by modern standards of mass war (36,000, including sailors), but his riflemen alone doomed the ruling cavalry aristocracy of Cairo to utter defeat. Also, he carried the future in his own baggage...