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

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

£6.45
SKU B001789
  • 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.

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 noseless 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.

. . . Yemen before we fucked it up . . .

_______________________

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