Really informative and interesting book. But I've come across a lot of history books that present false information and with this book such that the utter lack of footnotes and endnotes is a problem for me (as it seems to be for others). If it had had such notes, I would have given the book 5 stars. The author's failure to provide citations for his claims is actually rather ironic given that he more than once criticizes past authors for their factual errors (while providing no support for his own claims here). Don't let the lack of footnotes or endnotes prevent you from reading this book, but don't take its claims at face-value unless you check them yourself. ( )

Robert Twigger demonstrates his impressive abilities as a raconteur in his book, Red Nile: A Biography of the World's Greatest River. He links thousands of years of human history and tells diverse and interesting stories about the social, geographical, military, political, etc. history of the region. He writes in an engaging, conversational manner that I quite liked. The topics of his stories included the famous (Napoleon, Cleopatra, Sadat, Flaubert...) and lesser known historical figures who were affected by the Nile in a variety of ways.

At times Twigger did express some still-lingering elements of a British colonialist mindset when talking about the varied occupations of the region. Also, he included a very small bibliography and did not directly cite any sources or include any footnotes in his work. Admittedly, his topic was enormous and a bibliography would likely have been as long as the actual book, but it would've been nice to see more information about where his stories came from. In some ways I reminded of the writing style of Shelby Foote, whose Civil War volumes are incredibly engaging but contain no references. Twigger was also typically cautious about accepting claims from primary sources at face value but did from time to time include statements of dubious value- I recall one in particular where he took a 19th century's explorer's description of a group encountered along the Nile to mean that they could likely have been an unknown group of Homo ergaster (who otherwise died out hundreds of thousands of years earlier.)

Overall I really enjoyed this book. It demonstrated the role the Nile has played in shaping human history for an extremely long period of time. ( )