A spectacular modern-day adventure along the Nile River from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea Inspired by Alan Moorehead's classic river chronicles, The Blue Nile and The White Nile, foreign correspondent Dan Morrison bought a plank-board boat, summoned a childhood buddy who'd never been off American soil, and set out from Uganda, paddling the White Nile on a quest across Sudan toward Cairo. In the vein of Redmond O'Hanlon and Ryszard Kapuscinski, the story of Morrison's four-thousandmile trip is a gripping blend of travel narrative and reportage that reveals this vast region's riches, troubles, and paradoxes. Morrison follows the river as the locals do-by boat, bus, and on foot-past the contested borderlands of Sudan, where a hidden oil war still rages, to the air-conditioned cafAcs of Khartoum and through modern Cairo, where control of the Nile outranks the Iranian nuclear program as a national security issue. By turns funny and frightening, The Black Nile is an engrossing and thoughtful contemporary portrait of a complex region in profound transition.