A painstaking work of research and careful observation.
A rich tapestry of Nile lore and legend, stretching from the ancients to the fall of the latest tyrant.
British author Twigger (Dr. Ragab’s Universal Language, 2009, etc.) lived in Cairo for seven years before fleeing the revolution in 2011. Here, the author compiles a vast compendium of drama and history around the attempts to control the Nile. Somewhat chronological but hardly linear, Twigger’s labor of love meanders, much like its subject. History itself began there, in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, from which emerged not one but three Niles: The Blue Nile rises in Ethiopia; the White in central Africa; and the mighty Red flowing from Lake Victoria (fed by the Kagera River coming down from the so-called Mountains of the Moon, which Twigger maintains is the Nile’s true source) to the Mediterranean Delta. Why is it red? That is the color of the silt, as well as the rare algal bloom known to turn the surface red and kill the fish, which might explain Egypt’s first plague: the “river of blood” Moses created when he struck the surface as dictated by God. Nonetheless, red is the color of blood, life, violence, passion and revolution, and the Nile delivers each in turn. The earliest inhabitants of the areas around the river were hunter-gatherers who followed the river as the game roamed and probably gave their things away as they moved rather than hoarding what they could not carry. Especially fascinating is the lore surrounding the powerful and dangerous animals that haunt the river and were depicted by ancients as demigods: baboons, hippos and crocodiles. Indeed, the Nile gave birth not only to mad kings and caliphs, from Cleopatra to Hakim, Napoleon to Lord Kitchener, but the theory of blood circulation, understood by Ibn al-Nafis 400 years before William Harvey.
A painstaking work of research and careful observation.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-05233-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Finely honed biographical intuition and a novelist’s sensibility make for a stylish, engrossing narrative.
A fresh, urbane history of the dramatic and melodramatic belle epoque.
When Barnes (The Only Story, 2018, etc.), winner of the Man Booker Prize and many other literary awards, first saw John Singer Sargent’s striking portrait of Dr. Samuel Pozzi—handsome, “virile, yet slender,” dressed in a sumptuous scarlet coat—he was intrigued by a figure he had not yet encountered in his readings about 19th-century France. The wall label revealed that Pozzi was a gynecologist; a magazine article called him “not only the father of French gynecology, but also a confirmed sex addict who routinely attempted to seduce his female patients.” The paradox of healer and exploiter posed an alluring mystery that Barnes was eager to investigate. Pozzi, he discovered, succeeded in his amorous affairs as much as in his acclaimed career. “I have never met a man as seductive as Pozzi,” the arrogant Count Robert de Montesquiou recalled; Pozzi was a “man of rare good sense and rare good taste,” “filled with knowledge and purpose” as well as “grace and charm.” The author’s portrait, as admiring as Sargent’s, depicts a “hospitable, generous” man, “rich by marriage, clubbable, inquisitive, cultured and well travelled,” and brilliant. The cosmopolitan Pozzi, his supercilious friend Montesquiou, and “gentle, whimsical” Edmond de Polignac are central characters in Barnes’ irreverent, gossipy, sparkling history of the belle epoque, “a time of vast wealth for the wealthy, of social power for the aristocracy, of uncontrolled and intricate snobbery, of headlong colonial ambition, of artistic patronage, and of duels whose scale of violence often reflected personal irascibility more than offended honor.” Dueling, writes the author, “was not just the highest form of sport, it also required the highest form of manliness.” Barnes peoples his history with a spirited cast of characters, including Sargent and Whistler, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt (who adored Pozzi), Henry James and Proust, Pozzi’s diarist daughter, Catherine, and unhappy wife, Therese, and scores more.
Finely honed biographical intuition and a novelist’s sensibility make for a stylish, engrossing narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65877-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
It took 14 years to build and it cost 15 million dollars and the lives of 20 workmen. Like the Atlantic cable and the Suez Canal it was a gigantic embodiment in steel and concrete of the Age of Enterprise. McCullough's outsized biography of the bridge attempts to capture in one majestic sweep the full glory of the achievement but the story sags mightily in the middle. True, the Roeblings, father and son who served successively as Chief Engineer, are cast in a heroic mold. True, too, the vital statistics of the bridge are formidable. But despite diligent efforts by the author the details of the construction work — from sinking the caissons, to underground blasting, stringing of cables and pouring of cement — will crush the determination of all but the most indomitable reader. To make matters worse, McCullough dutifully struggles through the administrative history of the Brooklyn Bridge Company which financed and contracted for the project with the help of the Tweed Machine and various Brooklyn bosses who profited handsomely amid continuous allegations of kickbacks and mismanagement of funds. He succeeds in evoking the venality and crass materialism of the epoch but once again the details — like the 3,515 miles of steel wire in each cable — are tiresome and ultimately entangling. Workmanlike and thorough though it is, McCullough's history of the bridge has more bulk than stature.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1972
ISBN: 0743217373
Page Count: 652
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1972
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