A Winter in Arabia - Softcover

Stark, Freya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590206460 ISBN 13: 9781590206461

Publisher: Overlook Pr, 2011

Synopsis

A Winter in Arabia recounts her 1937-8 expedition in what is now Yemen, a journey which helped secure her reputation not only as a great travel writer, but also as a first-rate geographer, historian, and archaeologist. There, in the land whose "nakedness is clothed in shreds of departed splendor," she and two companions spent a winter in search of an ancient South Arabian city. Offering rare glimpses of life behind the veil-the subtleties of business and social conduct, the elaborate beauty rituals of the women, and the bitter animosities between rival tribes, Freya Stark conveys the "perpetual charm of Arabia ... that the traveler finds his own level there simply as a human being."

About this title

Review:

"As an explorer, Stark could claim no major discoveries, but her acute observations and her surveying skills had earned her professional respect . . . She was a vivid describer of scenes and landscapes . . . She was a finely calibrated recording instrument in a land that was just awakening to the changes being wrought by paved roads, nation-states, and oil . . . "A Winter in Arabia" recounts how, bored and disillusioned by an expedition with a trained archeologist and with its painstakingly glorious achievements, Stark set off again to explore the frankincense lands . . . There is a quiet melancholy to these books-- an unshakable sense of cultures irretrievably lost, and of the ruthlessness of time, which seems to arise both from the nature of the subject and from the nature of the traveler growing old." -- "The New Yorker"
"Freya Stark... must be left to ride her donkey forever along the empty beaches and the roadless valleys of the 50s Turkish landscape... She, like Homer, Al

About the Author:

Freya Stark, described by The Times of London as "the last of the Romantic Travellers" upon her death in 1993, published during her lifetime more than thirty books about her travels in the Middle East, including The Southern Gates of Arabia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Overlook Pr
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1590206460
• ISBN 13: 9781590206461
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320