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Summary: A thrIller set in Africa at the beginning of World War II.
Review: I found this vivid African thriller to be a terrific combination of history, adventure and bittersweet romance. With Mussolini's Italian arrmy invading Ethiopia while the white hunter hero is on safari with his wild American clients (a pair of beautiful and spoiled twins from Kentucky), and with other exotic characters intriguing and romancing in 1935 Cairo, it's a rather old-fashioned and very well-written non-stop adventure. The atmosphere is compelling, and I felt I was in Africa. I recommend it to readers who like exciting historical novels and don't mind a few sexy scenes.
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Summary: A Cafe on the Nile
Review: I read an average of two books a week. This is the best book I have read this year. This book has a fast moving plot and delightful characters and a pace I haven't seen since I read the Hardy Boys mysteries as a child. Bull has chosen a location and time that is unfamiliar to most of us. The historical setting alone is worth the time. His turn of phrase comes close to the quality of Tom Robbins with a richness of lexicon that is like rich chocolate. The predecessor novel The White Rhino Hotel is also worth your time. I only wish Bull were more prolific.
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Summary: Enjoyable read
Review: I saw this book while cruising the shelves at a well known book store. This is the first Bartle Bull book I have read. The story is good with and interesting plot. The characters are very colorful but somewhat cliche. The pace of the book is pretty good so it was an easy, quick read. I am thinking about reading the other book with these characters, The White Rhino Hotel, just to see where the characters come from and how they got to the point where Cafe begins. All in all its a decent book. Good for a good, quick summer read
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Summary: A Detailed Journey of the Mind
Review: If nothing else Bartel Bull can be described as a master of description. It is not the type of description that evokes emotion but one that stimulates the senses. In Café on the Nile I could see the water of the Nile pouring into the farmlands and feel the coolness it brought to the parched land. I could smell the gun oil on the Colonels Barretta, feel the dust of the desert in my eyes and taste the fruits being eaten by the Doctor. But, all of this comes at a price. At times the minute descriptions take a lot of concentration and make the going slow. That being said, the book is a wonderful mind journey into a place and time few of us know existed. Bartel Bull has carefully crafted a work of fiction so full of facts that it can act as a textbook for Egypt and Ethiopia at the time of the Italian invasion. So careful is the author to get things right that he dedicates a page in the back of the book to explain the few places where he took "literary license." I recommend this book for any serious mind traveler, it is a first class ticket but be prepared to pay the price with your attention, it is not a light read.
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Summary: A Rip-roaring Old-fashioned Read!
Review: They don't write 'em like this anymore. Or at least they don't write and publish enough of them. Here is a tale of high adventure set in the wilds of Africa (from the rough and tumble city of Cairo, Egypt to the highlands of Ethiopia) on the eve of World War II. Bull writes vividly about a fascinating cast of characters caught up in events which are both world shaking and personally significant to each of them. World War I is only just behind these people and World War II is already looming on the horizon. Fascist Italy has pretensions to empire in Africa and poison gas is to be the key to it. All the while, the Goan dwarf, Olivio Fonseca Alavedo, is poised to grow rich with his schemes to corner the cotton market while his friends are struggling with the Depression-induced poverty of the thirties.Into this shaken time come twin sisters from America, paying for a safari to be conducted by Olivio's old friend, the hunter Anton Rider out of Kenya, while Anton's lovely wife Gwenn, who has left him to do something more significant with her life, and for her two sons, lives nearby, the mistress of a clever Italian air force officer whose attentions enable her to pursue her medical studies at the University of Cairo. An elder, down-at-the-heels English gentleman rounds out Olivio's little circle of close friends while the rough-edged German adventurer, Ernst von Decker, shows up to draw Rider into his own schemes. Although the players are mostly of the stock sort, they are engagingly drawn. I loved how Bull portrays the "white hunter", Rider, as a veritable fish out of water in the mean streets of Cairo, stumbling awkwardly about and giving his prospective clients second thoughts about him, yet a man who is masterfully competent in his own milieu in the bush. And the Goan dwarf, Olivio, is an especially intriguing (and oddly touching) personality in his machinations to outlast and defeat his scheming enemies in the Cairene bureaucracy while grappling with personal disabilities which would defeat lesser souls. And yet, there was something pro-forma about it all. One of the inside blurbs called this book "a cup of CASABLANCA, a dollop of Isak Dinesen, a pinch of INDIANA JONES and a touch of TENDER IS THE NIGHT." I think that's about right and that it makes for a very heady brew if you like this sort of thing. As it happens, I do. There were, however, a few problems since the tale did seem somewhat drawn out and not nearly as compelling in the middle as at the end. And I was made a bit uncomfortable by the constant shifts between locales and story lines as the action was continuously deferred in one place to look in on alternating players elsewhere as the tale progressed. My own preference is for a story which pretty much carries you right through the main line of action. But the varying streams were each interesting in their own way and, while slowing up the read, did not finally halt it. I found myself more and more anxious to see how the characters would work themselves out of their various predicaments (though I never doubted for a moment that they would). Although they were not the deepest of personalities and were plainly stereotypes, they were nicely drawn for the most part (though I had some problem with the lack of presence of Olivio's Kikuyu wife, Kina). There is a bit of graphic sexuality and violence here but nothing that seemed out of the way for this sort of book and the events it portrayed. However, I thought Mr. Bull's credibility and authorial authority somewhat compromised in the end when he consistently referred to crocodiles as amphibians rather than the reptiles they are. At first I thought it an editorial slip but he did it more than once which I found jarring (though not debilitating to the tale which did seem to reflect a real feel for the terrain). I guess Mr. Bull is just not strong in the sciences . . . or had a momentary lapse. Yet, with all these caveats I have to pound the table for this book because most of the time I wanted to keep going back despite all and, in the end, I couldn't stop until I'd finished it. And when I had, it felt as though I'd been there. -- SWM
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Summary: A great epic story - but terrible use of German.
Review: This is story well worth reading. The writer seems to know his terrain very well and writes in an easy and fascinating style. However, the book loses one star due to its terrible use of German sentences. Nearly every single German sentence uttered by Ernst von Decken is spelled wrong and some sentences plainly have been translated word by word from a dictionary and make no sense. Since the author uses German sentences quite frequently, an effort should have been made to have these corrected by a German-English speaker.
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Summary: A great epic story - but terrible use of German.
Review: This is story well worth reading. The writer seems to know his terrain very well and writes in an easy and fascinating style. However, the book loses one star due to its terrible use of German sentences. Nearly every single German sentence uttered by Ernst von Decken is spelled wrong and some sentences plainly have been translated word by word from a dictionary and make no sense. Since the author uses German sentences quite frequently, an effort should have been made to have these corrected by a German-English speaker.
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Summary: excellent reading!
Review: This is the first Bartle Bull I've read but won't be the last. Thoroughly enjoyable and difficult to put down. Very fast paced and it just keeps going and going. Sort of like Tom Clancy without the techno-babble and Robert Ludlum without the gory details. I got caught up in what was going to happen next to the characters, the color of Cairo, Ethiopia and colonial empires circa 1935 and the plot. Although the characters are many, they are well developed. I got a sense of knowing them well quickly without page after page of agonizing character building. I just became a fan of BB. On to the Devil's Oasis and Shanghai Station.
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Summary: A very enjoyable read
Review: This is the type of novel that allows just the correct amount of history, exotic locale and adventure to make a great reading experience. Pre WW II Africa is the setting just prior to the Italian invasion. The story, characters and conflicting cultures made for me a truly enjoyable read.
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