Cascoly Books: Egypt & North Africa

Cascoly Books - Egypt & North Africa

GUIDE BOOKS

Blue Guide Egypt A must have if you have any interest in ancient Egyptian history or Islamic architecture. For wandering around Cairo, it's worth its weight (and it is rather solid) for the layouts and plans of mosques and other sites. The descriptions and history can't be beat.
Lonely Planet Egypt : A Travel Survival Kit (4th Ed); Leanne Logan, et al As good as the Blue Guides are, you still need something for the nuts and bolts of travel, especially if you're doing it independently.
Insight Guides Cairo;The Insight guides are helpful for planning your trip, and offer a photographic preview. But I leave them at home for the actual trip, as they don't really add much to the other guide books.
The Penguin Guide to Ancient Egypt ; William J. Murnane
A Guide to the Sacred Places of Ancient Egypt ; John Anthony West Now here's a really strange book -- it's one of the best descriptions of the sights and sites of Ancient Egypt, yet written by one of the more controversial of the newage brand of Egyptology. But if you take West's theories (such as the ultra-ancient sphinx) with enough salt, his tours of the actual sites are well worth reading.

History

CIA World Factbook for Egypt

The Complete Valley of the Kings : Tombs and Treasures of Egypt's Greatest Pharaohs

Lords of the Atlas

Savage War of Peace - Algerian civil war

The Complete Pyramids

The Complete Tutankhamun : The King, the Tomb, the Royal Treasure

Chronicle of the Pharaohs : The Reign-By-Reign Record of the Rulers and Dynasties of Ancient Egypt

Fiction

The Abyssinian Yet another interesting concept, well begun, but ultimately retreating to cliché. The first half of the book is quite good – detailing the travels of an embassy from Louis IV to the Negus (emperor) of Abyssinia in 1699. The novelist makes good use of the intrigues and mistrust among the various Catholic and other Western factions. The hero is a young herbalist whose medical knowledge gives him near miraculous powers, and provides several easy escapes from intricate plot devices. But these sections do impart a good sense of what it might be like to travel in these then unknown parts of the world, down the Nile, through Egypt and the Sudan, and ultimately to Ethiopia. (A good map would have been handy for this, as the areas involved are not well-known, even today.) But, about half way through, the descriptions and background can’t hide the predictability of the plot, and the Candidean romantic subplot detracts from the overall effect.

Dorothy Dunnett -

Scales of Gold

The Unicorn Hunt

Send a Fax From the Kasbah

In an Antique Land (Vintage Departures)

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