THE BLUE NILE

New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962. First edition, so stated on the copyright page, book club issue. With illustrations and maps throughout. 8vo, publisher’s original blue cloth, with gilt lettered spine, in the pictorially decorated dustjacket. xii, 308 including index pp. A fine copy. FIRST EDITION OF A CORE TEXT. "This book, together with THE WHITE NILE which had already been published, completes a study of the history of the river in the nineteenth century. It is intended that the two books, though complementing one another, should be read quite separately. THE WHITE NILE dealt with the years between 1856 and 1900. Here I have stepped back half a century and am concerned with events on the Blue Nile and on the main stream that descends from Ethiopia through the Sudan and Egypt and into the sea” (from the author's note.)
“Here is a panorama of glittering colour, pounding excitement and continual fascination and it is dominated by four diverse and enthralling characters who act and react against a background of slavery and massacre, political upheaval and the bloodshed of war; a Scottish adventurer, of great height and massive prejudice, an obscure corporal who became Emperor, a Turkish government official who made his influence felt and feated throughout North Africa, and a black despot prone to the most terrifyingly rapid transitions from overpowering benevolence to murder and destruction on the grandest scale.
“James Bruce, Napoleon, Muhammad Ali, the Emperor Theordore of Ethiopia, this is an extraordinary quartet.... This is a book of elndless interest on a riveting and neglected theme” (from the dustjacket).