Tim Mackintosh-Smith - Yemen (Travels in Dictionary Land) (2nd Hand Hardback)

Synopsis

This book won the 1998 Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award and is now regarded as a classic of Arabian description.

". . . our ideas of the Arabian Peninsula have been hijacked: by images of the desert, by oil, by the Gulf War. But there is another Arabia."

For the classical geographers Yemen was a fabulous land where flying serpents guarded sacred incense groves. Medieval Arab visitors told of disappearing islands and menstruating mountains. Vita Sackville-West found Aden 'precisely the most repulsive corner of the world'. Arguably the most fascinating but least known country in the Arab world, Yemen has a way of attracting comment that ranges from the superficial to the wildly fictitious.

In Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, Tim Mackintosh-Smith writes with an intimacy and depth of knowledge gained through over twenty years among the Yemenis. He is a travelling companion of the best sort - erudite, witty and eccentric. Crossing mountain, desert, ocean and three millennia of history, he portrays hyrax hunters and dhow skippers, a noiseless regicide, and a sword-wielding tyrant with a passion for Heinz Russian salad.

Yet even the ordinary Yemenis are extraordinary: their family tree goes back to Noah and is rooted in a land which, in the words of a contemporary poet, has become the dictionary of its people. Every page of this book is dashed - like the land it describes - with the marvellous.

Details

• Format : Standard 2nd Hand Hardback with Dust Jacket
• Condition : Good (Owner Signature & Slight Tanning to Pages)
• Category : Non-Fiction - The Rest of The World
• Published : 1997 (John Murray Publishing - 1st Edition)
• ISBN : 9780719556227
• SKU : B001789
• PPC : SP550gm
• RRP : £18 (Unclipped)
• Quantity Available : 1 only.

External Reviews

" . . . scholarly and entertaining . . . Mackintosh Smith succeeds admirably in shining a light on an obscure corner of the world" - Financial Times.