UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · DESCRIPTION AND TRAVEL · TRAVEL
Wilfred Thesiger
Also known as: Mubarak bin London
Major Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger, CBE, DSO, FRAS, FRGS, also called Mubarak bin London (Arabic for "the blessed one from London")(3 June 1910 – 24 August 2003) was a British explorer and travel writer. Thesiger is best known for his travel books Arabian Sands (1959), on his foot and camel crossing of the Empty Quarter of Arabia, and The Marsh Arabs (1964), on his time living in the marshes of Iraq with the Marsh Arabs. He donated his collection of 23,000 travel photographs to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.
Legends were born here.
— from Wild
Most acclaimed
Arabian sands
1959
Story of five years of travel with the nomad Arabs in the unknown deserts of Southern Arabia.
Wild
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she'd lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage was soon destroyed, and slowly her life spun out of control. Four years after her mother's death, with nothing more to lose, Strayed made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker--indeed, she'd never gone backpacking before her first night on the trail. Her trek was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone. Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and intense loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her. [www.cherylstrayed.com]
The desert
"The desert is the ultimate place of illusion. A space of silence, mystery and solitude, it is both a setting and a vehicle for dreams and myths, a place where the horizon seems to evaporate and where all visual landmarks are absent.". "Europe's discovery of the desert in the nineteenth century went hand-in-hand with the invention of photography. This catalogue examines the ways in which photography has captured the desert, and how cinema, relayed by video, shows it. It is organized around a series of images of the desert landscape by such artists as Herge, Wilfred Thesiger, Bill Viola, Balthasar Burkhard, Raymond Depardon, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Many of these works - executed in the Sahara and in the deserts of Namibia, Libya, Australia and the American Southwest - have been specially commissioned for this volume."--BOOK JACKET.