Desert, Marsh and Mountain - Hardcover

Thesiger, Wilfred

4.29

86 ratings by Goodreads

9781873544570: Desert, Marsh and Mountain

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 187354457X ISBN 13: 9781873544570

Publisher: Motivate Publishing, 1997

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Dust jacket notes: "In this lavishly illustrated book, Wilfred Thesiger - one of the last in a great British tradition of individual and often eccentric travelers - recreates a lifetime's journeying in some of the world's least-known places. As fine a photographer as a writer, he here assembles the most striking collection ever published of photographs portraying the desert, marshes, mountains and other remote regions where he has travelled. He recalls the formative influences of his unusual childhood in Abyssinia - forested mountains, wild animals, adventurous journeys, savage splendor - and visits to imperial India where his uncle was Viceroy. School in England was followed by Oxford University, but before he left Oxford he had developed a passion for remote travel, and by his early twenties he had carried out a notably hazardous African exploration. Five years with the Sudan Political Service then led him to barely-known regions of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and to a major Saharan journey which deepened his intense feeling for the desert. The War brought distinction in irregular fields - the liberation of Abyssinia where he won a DSO under Wingate; a sideshow operation in Syria; long-range patrols in the Western Desert. After the War he devoted himself single-mindedly to the life of his choice: seeking always the unknown land, the unfrequented mountain range, the unspoilt tribe, the society untainted by Western values. It has been a romantic vision, but an austere one, with much danger, thirst and loneliness, redeemed by the companionship of peoples who accepted hardship with fierce price, set little store on life, yet possessed a key to living. Five epic years with the Bedu, just before oil transformed them, placed the author in the front rank of British Arabists. Later he lived, as no Westerner had lived, in the strange world of the Marshmen of Iraq...."

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.