Three Empires on the Nile

Dominic Green has the knack of mixing a true story with a dry sense of humor to make learning enjoyable. His history focuses on Egypt and its split from the Ottoman Empire following the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869. Narrator Stephen Hoye adopts a false stodginess to capitalize on the humorous alliterations: for example, "Christ, cricket, and cheese sandwiches" or "Sudan, slavery, and salvation." His slow pace magnifies the enjoyment of the author's delicious descriptions of characters as arrogant and colorful as those in a Dickens novel. Stephen Hoye uses an upper-class British accent and segues to French and Arabic accents expertly. We give two thumbs up: one for the tale and one for the teller. J.A.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Starred review from October 9, 2006
Green (The Double Life of Doctor Lopez: Spies, Shakespeare and the Plot to Poison Elizabeth I
) has written a formidable work of popular narrative history describing the tumultuous events that took place in northeastern Africa in the final third of the 19th century. Breathing life into, among many others, the starchy British general Charles Gordon and his fanatical antagonist, the Mahdi, who launched a movement that was a forerunner of today's radical Islamist sects, Green examines an era that witnessed the rise of no fewer than three empires (the Egyptian tyranny of Khedive Ishmail, the apocalyptic "fantasy" of the Mahdi, and the British Empire, which "arrived in a flurry of humanitarian concern, but endured through brutal force"). Cautionary modern parallels of this, the first clash of Arab nationalism, Western intervention and Islamic fervor, are of course never far from breaking the surface, but Green carefully prevents them from becoming overtly apparent. He succeeds in not only untangling the complex politics of the Great Powers as they reacted to the crisis along the Nile but also explaining the equally opaque motivations of the shadowy Mahdi and his followers as they pursued their jihad. 16 pages of color photos.