Story of the Nile: A Journey through Time along the World's Longest River

The wide screen format suits the subject of this good-looking book. It’s a series of double page panoramic historical scenes on the Nile, taking the reader from the river’s source at Lake Victoria to its mouth at Alexandria, and covering the events of five millennia.

There is very little text and Noon’s illustrations carry most of the information. This is serious Where’s Wally?, with crowds of people deployed like extras in an epic movie, and the reader often straining to make out what these tiny people are doing. They are labelled, it’s true, and there is a single line of text marching round outside the border of the big picture, accompanied by even tinier snapshots of the main event, but it is not a comfortable experience.

An earlier book in the series, A Street through Time, was a deserving winner of a History Book of the Year Award. Its strength was that it took the same scene and moved forward steadily in time, showing the changes in English town and landscape in each era. Here, there is a different location and period for each stop on the river. The book jumps about alarmingly in time, with the funeral of King Khufu in 2500 BC preceding a picture of Salah el Din setting off to war in 1190 AD, which is then followed by a scene at Per Rameses in 1260 BC. You can admire Noon’s composition and pore over each picture, even hunting the Dorling Kindersley stork which (memories of the Usborne duck) is hiding somewhere, but it’s difficult to make sense of the book as a whole and to put the individual scenes into historical context. As usual, with DK, there is a cramped index and no further reading or websites suggested.