![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Still, those three stories are riveting, and additionally benefit from being ones I had never heard before, (whereas I was already familiar with at least the basics of most of The White Nile's stories - Burton/Speke, Gordon/the Mahdi, Stanley/Livingstone, etc). And so the overarching theme of Blue is more of a stretch than in White. After that, the book focuses on three separate stories - the French in Egypt, the Turks in the Sudan, and the British in Ethiopia - which in descending order have less and less to do with the river proper, until in the final section on Ethiopia, the river is barely mentioned at all. However, there is no such thread in The Blue Nile, since it's source was never truly in question the entire story of the Blue's exploration is fully told in the book's first 50 pages. ![]() The White Nile focuses on the exploration of the Nile and the search for it's source, telling a number of other stories along the way but all still in the service of the greater history of the river itself. The White Nile is simply the better book, if only because the White Nile itself is the better story. That said, I cannot give this the 5 stars it probably deserves unless I could upgrade Moorehead's The White Nile to 6. Excellent book - Alan Moorehead is to Nilotic Africa what Peter Hopkirk is to Central Asia, except that Moorehead did it decades earlier. ![]()
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