Book reivew: Down The Nile

Entertainment Weekly

About seven years ago, when she was 38, Rosemary Mahoney rowed down the Nile,
alone, in a small skiff. ''What I wanted, really, was not just to seethe Nile River,'' she writes, ''but to sit in the middle of it in my own boat, alone.'' Whether she was deranged, courageous, or a little of both is a question that hangs over Down the Nile, her riveting account of the experience, a portrait of the artist as an obsessive, sunburned young woman and of the complicated male-dominated society that she encountered in that part of the world.

There have been countless books about the Nile, and Mahoney has familiarized herself with the best of them, interweaving the adventures of Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale with her own crisply described experience. Coolly dismantling some long-standing myths, she makes the modern Nile her own.

See the above page for more details.