Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River [Idioma Inglés] - Tapa dura

Críticas

Twigger's book on the history of the river Nile is one of the those unexpected great reads... This is a non-fiction book that reads like a great, page-turning novel. (CATHOLIC HERALD)

Red Nile is a scintillatingly colourful account of a river and a region that explorer/adventurer Twigger knows well... probably the author's magnum opus. (SUNDAY TIMES)

Red Nile by Robert Twigger is how history should be written and taught. The reader is taken on a sweeping journey through the endless story of the Nile, where so much began and so much is still happening. (Robin Hanbury-Tenison COUNTRY LIFE)

gives great insight into a place where the growth of civilisation is so closely lined to the power of nature. (GOOD BOOK GUIDE)

This torrent of tales sweeps up everything from hippos (the Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar kept four Nile hippos at his mansion in Medellín) to erotic papyrus. (The Daily Telegraph)

Robert Twigger's ambitious biography of the Nile is an unexpected triumph...a scintillatingly colourful account of a river and a region Twigger knows intimately...an elegiac moving book...hugely entertaining...probably the author's magnum opus (James McConnachie THE SUNDAY TIMES)

a tour de force; a brilliantly written scrapbook of history and travel, geography and science, myth and legend both ancient and modern... Twigger allows the river's ever changing shape to inform this engrossing biography. It's a vast subject but he never becomes overwhelmed by the material and has written an elegant, amusing and fascinating book, buoyed by his own enthusiasm, that draws you along in its current (Carl Wilkinson FINANCIAL TIMES)

Like the vast, fast-flowing river itself with its waters teeming with crocodiles, hippopotami and bilharzia, so Red Nile teems with arcane facts and high spirited asides... Red Nile provides a feast of quirky, fascinating bits of knowledge, both funny and memorable (Caroline Moorehead THE SPECTATOR)

Crocodiles, dams, feluccas, pharaohs and papyrus, disputation about sources, literary and riverine, myths and realities of fecundity: only someone as crazy as Robert Twigger would attempt to tell the whole story of the Nile from soup to nuts, yet in Red Nile that's exactly what he has done, filtering the vast flood of his subject matter through an infectious individual style (Giles Foden CONDE NAST TRAVELLER)

Using the physical presence of the river, the tumultuous recent events that have occurred along it and his own experiences... Twigger succeeds in capturing the key features of Africa's greatest river: that it is wide-reaching as it is long, touches every era of human history, from nobility to the baseless violence that has so often stained the waters red (Anthony Sattin THE SUNDAY TIMES)

Reseña del editor

So much begins on the banks of the Nile: all religion, all life, all stories, the script we write in, the language we speak, the gods, the legends and the names of stars. This mighty river that flows through a quarter of all Africa has been history's greatest and most sustained creator.

In this dazzling, idiosyncratic journey from ancient times to the Arab Spring, Robert Twigger weaves a Nile narrative like no other. Along the way we meet crocodiles and caliphs, nineteenth-century adventurers and twentieth-century novelists, biblical prophets and classical lovers, dam-builders and crusaders. As he navigates a meandering course through the history of the world's greatest river, he plucks the most intriguing, colourful and dramatic stories - truly a Nile red in tooth and claw.

The result is both an epic journey through the whole sweep of human (and pre-human) history, and an intimate biography of the curious life of this great river, overflowing with stories of excess, love, passion, splendour and violence.