Christopher Ondaatje
In Search of Nomads: An English Obsession from Hester Stanhope to Bruce Chatwin
In Search of Nomads: An English Obsession From Hester Stanhope to Bruce Chatwin
By John Ure
Constable 232pp £19.99 order from our bookshop
THIS ENTERTAINING BOOK chronicles the extraordinary Britons and Americans who have chosen to seek out and travel with nomads, focusing on the experiences of visitors to tribes in four territories: the Arabian peninsula, with its Bedouin; the Sahara, with its Moors and Tuareg; the mountain ranges of Southern Iran, with their migratory pastoral tribes; and the steppes of Central Asia, with their Mongol horsemen and Tartar descendants. John Ure, a former British ambassador to Brazil and Cuba who gives ‘travelling uncomfortably in remote places and writing about it comfortably afterwards’ as his recreation in Who’s Who, has made journeys with tribes in each of the four areas, and is thus well qualified to write this primer to wanderlust-struck Westerners.
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