Thesiger in Arabia

This set pairs two travel books. Arabian Sands, first published in 1959, recounts Thesiger's late-1940s crossings of the Empty Quarter with Rashid companions, the wells, hunger, and tribal politics of southern Arabia as oil and motors were arriving. The Marsh Arabs, first published in 1964, describes years spent among the Madan of the Iraqi marshes, their reed houses, buffalo, seasonal floods, and feuds, before drainage and the modern state closed that world. Both are first-person narratives of travel and dwelling. Together they form a two-part record of disappearing desert and wetland societies, not a general history of the Arab world.

Quarter bound in brown cloth, with illustrations of desert scenes to front and back paper boards. Brown slipcase with front illustration.