Empress of the Nile by Lynne Olson
I love Lynne Olson’s nonfiction books, Citizens of London, Those Angry Days, Madam Fourcade’s Secret War. Like Madam Fourcade, Olson’s latest book, Empress of the Nile, features an unsung female hero, Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt.
In the late 1950s, the newly elected President of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, announced a plan to construct a new dam on the Nile River south of the city of Aswan, upstream from Luxor. Although a political and agricultural necessity for the newly independent Egypt, the construction of the Aswan High Dam would submerge a dozen ancient Egyptian temples at the bottom of the new reservoir.
French archaeologist Desroches-Noblecourt was horrified and initiated plans to save the temples. Not only was it an enormous technological challenge to move the fragile, enormous structures, but it would cost almost a billion dollars, money Egypt did not have. Furthermore, Nasser was determined to build the dam on his time schedule, and if the temples were still in place when the blasting began, too bad.
NO was not a word in Desroches-Noblecourt’s vocabulary. She succeeded in the notoriously sexist world of French Egyptology and was active in the French Resistance during WWII. Raising a billion dollars and sparing with Nasser and France’s President de Gaulle– just another challenge.
Ultimately fifty countries, international corporations, celebrities, and UNESCO contributed to the rescue of the antiquities, including the famous temples at Abu Simbel. A remarkable financial and technological achievement!
Whether facing hostile French Egyptologists, Gestapo interrogators, or obstructionist politicians, Desroches-Noblecourt never let up. She died in 2011 at age ninety-seven.
WHAT OTHER REVIEWERS SAY
Lauren Willig, author of Band of Sisters: “Empress of the Nile is the best sort of micro- history: both an intimate portrait of a groundbreaking woman and a whirlwind tour through major events and personalities of the twentieth century.”
WHO WROTE IT
Lynne Olson is the New York Times bestselling author of Madam Fourcade’s Secret War, Last Hope Island, Those Angry Days, and Citizens of London. She has been a consulting historian for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. She lives in Washington, D.C.