Name: Arabian Sands
Rating: 4.136363636363637 (11 reviews)
ISBN: 9780141442075

Wilfred Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa in 1910 and educated at Eton and Oxford. Though British, he was repulsed by the softness and rigidity of Western life, "the machines, the calling cards, the meticulously aligned streets, etc." In the spirit of T.E. Lawrence, Thesiger spent five years exploring and wandering the deserts of Arabia. With vivid descriptions and colorful anecdotes he narrates his stories, including two crossings of the Empty Quarter, among peoples who had never seen a European and considered it their duty to kill Christian infidels.

Major Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger, CBE, DSO, FRAS, FRGS, also called Mubarak bin London (Arabic for "the blessed one from London")[1][2] (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.