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by: Wilfred Thesiger
List Price: $15.00Amazon.com's Price: $10.20 You Save: $4.80 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 910
EAN: 9780141442082
ISBN: 0141442085
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: January 02, 2008
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Sales Rank: 87095
Studio: Penguin Classics
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
During the years he spent among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq—long before they were almost completely wiped out by Saddam Hussein—Wilfred Thesiger came to understand, admire, and share a way of life that had endured for many centuries. Traveling from village to village by canoe, he won acceptance by dispensing medicine and treating the sick. In this account of a nearly lost civilization, he pays tribute to the hospitality, loyalty, courage, and endurance of the people, and describes their impressive reed houses, the waterways and lakes teeming with wildlife, the herding of buffalo and hunting of wild boar, moments of tragedy, and moments of pure comedy in vivid, engaging detail.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - travel and history
This author represents an era that preceded western involvement in the Arab world. It is both facinating and sad to read a good writers' account of his personal love of this mode of life and realization that it's almost doomed.
Rating:  - witness to a lost landscape
Thesiger's account of his visits to the marshlands in the 1950s and early 1960s, though perhaps not as well written as his crossing of the empty quarter or Gavin Maxwell's own account of the Iraqi marshlands, still remains a classic of modern exploration literature. His presage about what would soon happen to the marshes and their inhabitants is haunting, for as Nik Wheeler (photographer in Gavin Young's "Return to the Marshes") recently wrote in my "Wetlands of Mass Destruction: Ancient Presage ... Read More
Rating: - Another fascinating picture of a vanishing way of life
Wilfred Thesiger led an amazing life. He was one of those Englishmen who are happiest when living far away from the comforts of modern life in dangerous surroundings with seemingly "primitive" people. Following many years living with the Bedu of the Empty Quarter, Thesiger traveled to Iraq to immerse himself in the life and culture of the Marsh Arabs.
What he found was a fusion of Arabic/islamic culture into a older life style which had existed for well over three thousand years, hunting ... Read More
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