The Life of My Choice

by Wilfred Thesiger

Wilfred Thesiger is the last of the great British eccentric explorers, renowned for his travels through some of the most inaccessible places on earth. As a child in Abyssinia he watched the glorious armies of Ras Tafari returning from hand-to-hand battle, their prisoners in chains; at the age of 23 he made his first expedition into the country of the Danakil, a murderous race among whom a man's status in the tribe depended on the number of men he had killed and castrated. His books, "Arabian Sands" and "The Marsh Arabs", tell of his two sojourns in the Empty Quarter and the Marshes of Southern Iraq. In this autobiography, Wilfred Thesiger highlights the people who most profoundly influenced him and the events which enabled him to lead the life of his choice.

Genres: Travel, Biography, Nonfiction, Africa, History, Biography Memoir, Adventure

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger, KBE, DSO, MA, DLitt, FRAS, FRSL, FRGS, FBA, was a British explorer and travel writer born in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

Thesiger was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford University where he took a third in history. Between 1930 and 1933, Thesiger represented Oxford at boxing and later (1933) became captain of the Oxford boxing team.

In 1930, Thesiger returned to Africa, having received a personal invitation by Emperor Haile Selassie to attend his coronation. He returned again in 1933 in an expedition, funded in part by the Royal Geographical Society, to explore the course of the Awash River. During this expedition, he became the first European to enter the Aussa Sultanate and visit Lake Abbe.

Afterwards, in 1935, Thesiger joined the Sudan Political Service stationed in Darfur and the Upper Nile. He served in several desert campaigns with the Sudan Defence Force (SDF) and the Special Air Service (SAS) with the rank of major.

In World War II, Thesiger fought with Gideon Force in Ethiopia during the East African Campaign. He was awarded the DSO for capturing Agibar and its garrison of 2500 Italian troops. Afterwards, Thesiger served in the Long Range Desert Group during the North African Campaign.
There is a rare wartime photograph of Thesiger in this period. He appears in a well-known photograph usually used to illustrate the badge of the Greek Sacred Squadron. It is usually captioned 'a Greek officer of the Sacred Band briefing British troops'. The officer is recognisably the famous Tsigantes and one of the crowd is recognisably Thesiger. Thesiger is the tall figure with the distinct nasal profile. Characteristically, he is in Arab headdress. Thesiger was the liaison officer to the Greek Squadron.

In 1945, Thesiger worked in Arabia with the Desert Locusts Research Organisation. Meanwhile, from 1945 to 1949, he explored the southern regions of the Arabian peninsula and twice crossed the Empty Quarter. His travels also took him to Iraq, Persia (now Iran), Kurdistan, French West Africa, Pakistan, and Kenya. He returned to England in the 1990s and was knighted in 1995.

Thesiger is best known for two travel books. Arabian Sands (1959) recounts his travels in the Empty Quarter of Arabia between 1945 and 1950 and describes the vanishing way of life of the Bedouins. The Marsh Arabs (1964) is an account of the Madan, the indigenous people of the marshlands of southern Iraq. The latter journey is also covered by his travelling companion, Gavin Maxwell, in A Reed Shaken By The Wind — a Journey Through the Unexplored Marshlands of Iraq (Longman, 1959).

Thesiger took many photographs during his travels and donated his vast collection of 25,000 negatives to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

Reviews

[Shovelmonkey1 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't read a lot of autobiographies or biographies (if you ignore the fact that I recently reviewed Jordan's autobiography). I'm not sure why this is. As a general rule of thumb I'm inherently nosey and surely getting hold of a big stack of autobiographies would be an easy way to sate my nosiness in a non-intrusive non "News of World phone tapping" kind of way.

I make the exception for this gentleman. May I introduce to you, if you're not familiar with his work the amazing Wilfred Thesiger. Explorer, representative of the British Empire in many far flung corners of the globe, travel writer, anthropologist, photographer and humanitarian. Truly this is man from a time gone by and in some respects it was a nobler and gentler time.

Imagine if, as an embryo you're slooshing around in the miasma of your own primordial soup and someone says "hey not-yet-person, how would you like to choose exactly what sort of life you will have. Go on, pick any path no matter how wonderful, how obscure or dangerous or wealthy. Pick one now and that is how your life will turn out." Well, if I was in that position I would probably choose Wilfred Thesigers life. His autobiography is titled "The Life of My Choice" and for the most part it is the life of my choice too, or at least the life I would choose if the option was open to me.

Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1910 where his father was the Head of the Legation there. The family were friends with Haille Selassie, Lion of Judah and sheltered his children during the uprisings. After attending Eton and Oxford ( it seems a cliche but the man's Grandfather was a Viscount so he was never likely to end up in a technical college) Thesiger returned to Africa with the Royal Geographic Society as part of a group of surveyors. From there he developed a life long passion for the dusty empty places that form a core part of North Africa and the Middle East.

He served in World War II and had a distinguished military career but as soon as the war was over he returned to a solitary life and the desert fastness; a lifestyle which he was to favour for the rest of his life. While T.E Lawrence is still one of the most famous desert explorers and cataloguers of life among the Arab peoples at the beginning of the 20th century, Thesiger stands out as being more significant than Lawrence for one key reason. He could write. Lawrence struggled endlessly with the production of the manuscript which was to become The Seven Pillars of Wisdom; Thesiger on the other hand is fantastic writer who provides beautiful descriptions and observations based on his explorations, all of which are further highlighted by his rather epic skill as a photographer. His output includes Arabian Sands, The Marsh Arabs, The Last Nomad, Among the Mountains, Desert, Marsh and Mountain and the Danakil Diaries. If you were only ever to read one of his books I would recommend Arabian Sands.

Thesiger had a huge influence on me as I started at University. In my second year I abandoned a substantial part of my course and toured the Middle East largely walking and hitch hiking in order to try and capture some of what he and Lawrence had seen and experienced. I sought out mountains and desolate places, sand storms and ruins. Needless to say many elements of the culture and landscape have been eroded away by modern life and the acceptance of modern technology but you can still find them trapped between the pages of Thesigers autobiography and his travel writing.

[Jan-Maat]

Wilfred Thesiger wrote two notable travel books Arabian Sands & The Marsh Arabs. Arabian Sands tells the story of his exploration of the Empty Quarter - a vast area of desert in southern Saudi Arabia that stretches into Oman - during the late 1940s before the impact of the discovery of oil. The Marsh Arabs tell of trips through the former (and now in places undergoing restoration) marsh lands of southern Iraq.

The Life of My Choice doesn't really have anything of interest equal to either of those two books. The background to both of those trips is fleshed out. There are the childhood recollections of seeing the effectively medieval army of the Emperor of Abyssinia (the author's father was Britain's representative to the Imperial court) moving out to battle a usurper, some recollections of Hallie Selassie, some bits and pieces about his wartime service and employment in the colonial service (Sudan) as well as some brief overviews of some of his other journeys for example in the Danakil and Kurdistan.

Arabian Sands and the Marsh Arabs are remarkable pictures of places and people in the 1950s. Life of My Choice doesn't have as much to recommend itself to the reader, but what comes through very strongly is the author himself. His pleasure in unexplored and extreme environments is clear, as is the dissatisfaction and alienation that he experienced as a colonial officer in the Sudan.

His early experiences seem to explain the difference in tone and satisfaction between what he had to write about the more punishing adventures that he had in the Empty Quarter of Arabia and his more sedate travels in the marshlands of southern Iraq. The travels reveal the man.

[Daren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thesiger is a legend, and there are no dud books of his that I have read. He is fascinating, and a unique individual. Odd, for sure, but incredible in what he achieved in his life.
David Attenborough described him as "one of the very few people who in our time could be put on the pedestal of the great explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."

Hailed as Thesiger's autobiography, it covers really only a part of his life, and one could be forgiven for thinking it more a history of Abyssinia (or Ethiopia) and Sudan. It is not so much an autobiography, where he shares his thoughts and ambitions, more a very detailed account of his life, based on where he was and what his did. And I do mean in great detail. His time in Abyssinia and Sudan is explained month by month (day by day almost), the people he was with, things he was tasked with, and how he achieved them.

Born in Addis Ababa, where his father was British Consul, he had always had an affection for Abyssinia, and was personally invited by Emperor Haile Selassie to attend the coronation. And thus began a long relationship with the country. He travelled among the Danakil - a dangerous warrior tribe who seldom accept visitors, and earned their respect, then returned to explore the course of the Awash River, among other side exploration.

He then joined the Sudan Political Service, where he served from 1935 until 37. In this role he manages to peace of the many tribes, and administers large areas of Sudan on behalf of the UK and Egypt. In reality Thesiger was in his element, carrying out expeditions by camel and foot to explore little known routes to remain in contact with the tribes, hunting and camping. It was a different time, and much is made of his hunting exploits - which has upset a lot of reviewers of this book. At the risk of upsetting more people - a quote:

I know that today it sounds unforgivable to have shot seventy lion in five years, but that was fifty years ago and circumstances of that time cannot be judged by those of today. Lion were then rated as vermin in the Sudan, and were especially abundant in the Western Nuer District. Now wildlife is everywhere endangered; but in those days, with few exceptions, it was under no apparent threat.

He dedicates a lot of the book to explaining his day to day activities. When Italy invade Abyssinia, and Britain and the League of Nations (forerunner to the United Nations, with seemingly the same lack of teeth) do nothing to assist, other than recognise Italy as the aggressor, Thesiger feels obliged to assist, but cannot. Waiting until Britain are drawn into the world war takes longer than he would like.
Finally at the outbreak of Second World War he joins the Sudan Defence Force, and helps organise the Abyssinian resistance to the occupying Italians. He was eventually awarded the DSO for his actions there. As the war progresses, he becomes more anxious for more involvement, and eventually makes it into the SAS during the North African Campaign.

I found the chapters on the war particularly hard to keep track of. They were written perhaps for someone with a more thorough understanding of the geography - for me they were baffling. An example paragraph, P331:

Captain Simmonds, accompanied by Lieutenant Brown's Australian Operations Centre arrived at Sakela a few days after Sandford had left for Balayia, and he sent me to join Dedjazmatch Mangasha, whose forced were investing Dangela. The town was said to be garrisoned by ten battalions, commanded by a Colonel Torelli. However the Italian High Command, who were under the impression that a British Division was about to invade Gojjam, and were concerned by the resurgence of guerilla activity, had ordered Torelli to evacuate Dangela.

As the war peters out, he takes a position as a Political Advisor to Crown Prince Asfa Wossen of Ethiopia, at the request of his father Haile Selassie. A two year position he resigns after a year, and undertakes more travel - in this book he offers only a summary referring the reader to his books Desert, Marsh and Mountain, Arabian Sands, and The Marsh Arabs.
The book ends with a summary of Thesigers many years in Kenya. He again reverts to historian, and outlines the last years of the life of Haile Selassie, and the downfall of an Abyssinia he continues to feel a great affection for.

And so, to a rating. Not among Thesigers most readable books, and certainly not recommended to be read before his great works. There are other biographies, which probably offer more of the man (Alexander Maitland's is on my shelf to be read). As a work explaining Thesigers time before his great works, it remains valuable, and certainly for a work on Ethiopian history it contains much, but for a readable and interesting autobiography, it is hard to award more than 3.5 stars. Rounded down. This doesn't take away from the achievements of the man, it simply reflects the book.
3 stars.

[DoctorM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's just admit it: if you're male, you want to be Wilfred Thesiger. You do. Born to British diplomatic family in Abyssinia early in the century, growing up in a dying Edwardian world, then a life abroad in the outlands of Empire: governing districts in the Sudan, living among the Dinka and the Nuer, climbing to cliffside monasteries in Ethiopia... Wartime with the SAS in Ethiopia and the Western Desert. Then the great trek across the Empty Quarter and literary fame. Plus hunting amongst the Marsh Arabs in 1950s Iraq and clambering up and down the Himalayas. The last explorer, the obituaries called him a few years ago. By all accounts, a cold and distant man, ascetic to the core. But the man who'd get you through the ambush or up the mountain. And a fine writer. Damn it, no one should get to have all of his life. But Thesiger did. And you want to be him. You really do. However not?

[AndreaMarretti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Libro interessante ma che per qualche motivo non sono riuscito a godermi allo stesso modo di "Sabbie arabe" complice anche una traduzione ed un lavoro di editing che non mi è sembrato impeccabile.
Certamente resta un personaggio affascinante che racconta di un mondo che non esiste più e che lui incontrò nel momento in cui quel mondo e quel modo di vivere si avviava a finire: la quintessenza del "modo britannico" che si fece prima abissino eppoi arabo per comunione emotiva e di vita verso quei mondi che aveva incontrato da bambino e che gli sono rimasti sempre così familiari.
Bel libro, comunque.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some readers may be aware of the kind of boys’ adventure story that was popular around the middle years of the last century. Set in a far off colony, surrounded by veritable hordes of colour and dress not then encountered in the Home Counties, a tall, invariably fair-haired and clean-shaven upstanding British military type dressed in khaki uniform, pith helmet, puttees and boots, pursued heroic adventures against all odds, brought criminals to justice and discovered waterfalls or rivers then unknown to the residents of Surbiton. He was probably called Carruthers, if he was an officer, or perhaps Jenkins in the unlikely case that the lower social classes could breed a hero. This really was fiction, of course, but, after reading an autobiography entitled The Life Of My Choice, one wonders whether such stories might just have been based on the life of Wilfred Thesiger.

He was the last of the gentleman explorers, and earned fame for his crossing of the Arabian Desert’s empty Quarter and his time amongst the Marsh Arabs of the Tigris-Euphrates delta. But in The Life Of My Choice Wilfred Thesiger largely ignores these great achievements, primarily because their detail had already been covered in previous books. So in this volume we follow Thesiger across different country, throughout the years he spent in relative obscurity.

He was brought up in Abyssinia, where his father was British Ambassador, and it is the landscape, politics, history and people of Abyssinia-Ethiopia that form the backbone of this highly readable and informative autobiography. He travels the length and breadth of this varied terrain, meets hordes of people, rubs shoulders with emperors and aristocracy, employs naked bearers and clearly feels totally at home, without once suggesting he might lose his inborn and outwardly visible English upper crust.

Of course he was sent away to Eton. Of course he went to Oxford. Of course he won a boxing blue. Is there any other way to live? One wonders, reading the rest of his exploits, whether he might have shot swans on the Thames. But his heart was never in anything to do with English society. His dreams were always plodding across Africa with a camel or a donkey. Refectory plum duff and custard would surely have seemed strange to someone who regularly ate from a communal pot with his fingers, seated on the hard-baked soil under the stars.

An aspect of Thesiger that never ceased to amaze throughout the book is that he never really seemed to have a career. He was always doing something, was always occupied with activities rather official, but his status was often at best negotiable. And so he takes us on a journey to examine the struggle for the Ethiopian throne, the Italian invasion and occupation of Abyssinia and its eventual liberation all at first hand. We are in the court of Emperor Haile Selassie, or Ras Tafari as Theisger usually prefers to call him. We are in the bush shooting big game and several smaller things too, alongside an occasional human being. We are then operating in Sudan and Egypt in the Second World War. We are, in fact, all over the place, but along the way usually sleeping rough under the stars, eating little and more often than not shunning most forms of formal social contact.

Throughout the book it is the contrast between this explorer’s life and the man’s social origins that provides an energy that seems to motivate him. Thesiger always seems to be getting away from something, drawn by an apparent simplicity he sees in a life that directly engages with nature and landscape. One wonders whether he ever met fellow countrymen as such equals. Take, for example, his almost passing comment about a relative: “Uncle Fred was an austere and impressive figure, whom some people found forbidding. Until I was seventeen… I thought of his as the rather alarming head of the family. Then unexpectedly, he invited Brian and me to stay in Northumberland where he had taken a grouse moor for the summer…” It was just the moor, it seems, and not the whole county.

And now, as we read about the exploits of this pith-helmeted anachronism, we are reminded of just how much certain attitudes have changed. Of a college don, for instance, he writes: “An untidy man, with frequent egg stains down his waistcoat, he always brought his smelly little dog in with him, and would tolerate no women undergraduates in his class.” Of Evelyn Waugh, Thesiger admits that he “disapproved of (Waugh’s) grey suede shoes, his floppy bow tie and the excessive width of his trousers.” But in those amongst whom he travelled, he himself apparently tolerated almost whatever he encountered, usually offering little judgment or even comment. He describes thus some practices associated with adultery and extra-marital sex: “to beget a child on an unmarried girl was a serious crime: the offender became an outcast and, if the girl died in childbirth, he was killed: the child was always buried alive.”

He encounters people who regard killing men, specifically men, as part of their right of passage into adulthood. And to prove they have killed someone, they take a trophy from the corpse which they then present as evidence of their deed. How, do you imagine, could you prove it was a man you had killed? Imagine no further, and Thesiger describes the practice and the still extant, if rather dried evidence with an almost glib detachment.

Thesiger is also prone to the occasional turn of phrase. We learn, for instance, of a man called Cox, “renowned for his ability to keep silent in a dozen languages.” But we also notice that Thesiger only rarely seems to generate friendliness with his English peers. And anything else he seems to shoot. He waxes lyrical about wildlife and then shoots it. Attitudes really have changed in the last seventy years.

And it is perhaps these changes that make The Life Of My Choice such an engaging read. Today this is a life stranger than most pith-helmeted fiction. It’s not just another era; it might as well be another universe. But this is also a history of our own time, a history whose longer-term consequences are still being enacted in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. Through Thesiger’s eyes, aspects of both areas, now much ignored, can still be seen with clarity.

[Lalitha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being an explorer in uncharted territories where no man has gone before is a dream for many but only a few dare to achieve that dream. One of the last greatest explorers of lands which hitherto had been impossible to penetrate was Sir Wilfred Thesiger.

It always seemed reading his autobiography The Life of My Choice, that he never once held a real job but was always doing something for the people around him who lived the harshest of lives – in the Abyssinian plains and the deserts of Sahara. Living with savage tribes with some barbaric practices, he sympathized with them the most, so much so that he fought on their side against the Italians in the war. To him, they were his people – people he lived with, people he travelled with and people he shared food and home with. “Harder the life, finer the man” he said and what a fine man he was! On several of his explorations he had to go without water and food for days but the more he went on such journeys, the more he craved them. “In the desert,” he wrote, “I found a freedom unattainable in civilisation; a life unhampered by possessions.”

The book is a wonderful account of his travels, his observations of the local populace, his increased dislike for modernity- Many a time he expressed his disdain for motor vehicles, preferring camels for traversing across the sand dunes and his everlasting admiration and friendship with emperor Haile Selassie. He was fortunate to live a life of exploration and we are fortunate to live these lands through his eyes.

[Richard Bartholomew · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the close of his memoir, Wilfred Thesiger describes himself as "perhaps the last explorer in the tradition of the past", whose feats of endurance took him to the remotest parts of East Africa and Arabia "just in time" before the arrival of tourism, industry, and the corruptions of modernity.

Thesiger's understated prose reveals a naturalist's eye for the landscapes he traversed and surveyed, the peoples he lived among, and the animals he observed (and frequently shot), but his book is also a chronicle of turbulent times. He writes: "Many of my generation were to be passionately concerned with the Spanish Civil War. I felt no such involvement: I detested the anarchists and communists on the Government side, and hated the Italians with whom Franco had allied himself. But with the Abyssinian cause I identified myself completely."

Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa in 1910. His father was the British consul-general; an early memory was of Ras Tafari's (the future Haile Selassie) son Asfa Wossen being given sanctuary at the legation during the conflict with Lij Yasu (Iyasu V), the young Emperor who had embraced Islam and was threatening to bring Abyssinia into the Great War on the side of the Central Powers. Haile Selassie became a family friend; Thesiger advocates for his memory as a dignified and abstemious reformer who was devoted to the improvement of his country, and he writes with some bitterness about the lack of respect with which he was treated by British officialdom during the years of the Italian invasion.

Reflecting on the 1974 communist revolution, Thesiger quotes the Ambassador Willie Morris as saying that it had been "largely brought about by British and American communist school teachers and university lecturers"; however, he also censures the journalist Jonathan Dimbleby for a television report that juxtaposed images of famine in Wollo with a palace banquet in Addis Ababa in way that Thesiger says was misleading, but which cost Haile Selassie much of his support in Europe. It is good that Thesiger survived until 2003, and so would have been aware of the post-communist recovery and known that in 2000 Haile Selassie was at last given a decent funeral, 25 years after his death (as described by William Deedes in a book I discussed here).

During the Second World War, Thesiger served with Orde Wingate in Abyssinia, with the Druze in Syria (against the Vichy French and preparing for a German invasion that never came), and then with David Stirling as a member of the SAS behind enemy lines in the Western Desert. He also spent time in Cairo, reluctantly accepting an assignment to stay in the city undercover if the Germans reached the city (he assumed he would have been caught very quickly).

Thesiger’s portrait of Wingate – "an idealist and a fanatic" – is one of the book’s highlights, and there's some humour in his descriptions of Wingate's oddities. Thesiger found him to be somewhat unstable and obnoxious in his personal habits and dealings with others, and some of his orders seem have been incompetent; yet he also acknowledged that Wingate had authority and inspiration, and that he afterwards achieved great things in Burma. However, Thesiger disapproved of Wingate's Zionism, and his negative impression of the movement was confirmed during time spent in Palestine. Wingate confided to Thesiger that his identification with the Jewish people went back to bullying he had experienced at school.

In the Western Desert, Thesiger was obliged to use a mode of transport he detested – the motor car – to carry out commando raids against Italian and German forces. On one occasion his team was nearly caught, and Thesiger hid under a blanket for some hours as some German car stopped nearby to investigate ("I had Doughty’s Arabia Deserta in my haversack but felt little inclination to read"); after the war, he became aware of a letter by General Rommel published in English which indicated that the car had actually contained Rommel himself. Thesiger eventually reached Sousse in Tunisia alongside regular troops from New Zealand, and he recalls "the town was full of hysterical Tunisian Jews with the Star of David sewn on their clothes" – a reminder that the Holocaust extended into North Africa.

One the book’s most famous lines concerns young Bedu tribesman who had just achieved manhood by killing and castrating three rivals; Thesiger writes that he "struck me as the Danakil equivalent of a nice, rather self-conscious Etonian who had just won his school colours for cricket". Thesiger regarded missionaries with distaste, and in discussing tribal revenge killings he candidly dismisses the idea of the sanctity of human life. However, on meeting the Anglican Assistant Bishop on a Nile paddle steamer he took communion "rather than disappoint this devout and well-meaning man", and although he did not believe in a personal God, he "accepted Christian ethics and to that extent regarded myself as Christian". Noting Henri de Monfried’s conversion to Islam, which cemented the French adventurer’s bond with the crew of his pearl-fishing boat, Thesiger says that this was "something I could never have done: not religious conviction but pride in my family background would have forbidden it".

The work also includes references to a couple of literary acquaintances: as a young man he received advice and encouragement from John Buchan, "his sensitive, ascetic face etched with lines of pain but lit by his innate kindliness"; Evelyn Waugh, in contrast, was "flaccid and petulant and I disliked him on sight". Thesiger was sorry that that he never got the chance to meet T. E. Lawrence through Buchan.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just an awesome individual, who along with such other characters as Francis Younghusband, Roy Chapman Andrews, Peter Fleming and Richard Burton, makes me feel like a total failure in life (but somehow in a good way). Includes some fascinating insights into pre-gone-to-hell Iraq. Interesting footnote: Thesiger himself has a hilarious cameo at the end of the humorous British travel classis "A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush."

[Anne Ruff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provided my first vicarious travel to Ethiopia. I poached the book off a wonderful friend's bookcase when I was living in Bangkok. The experience of living in a foreign land and reading about another foreign land was pretty heady stuff. Thesiger is a first rate tour guide: brave, respectful, with an iron stomach and sturdy feet. I grew to love him even more in his book about crossing the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula.

[Eric Pape · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thesiger is a giant amongst explorers, This book is excellent focusing on the man and his motives as much as his incredible acheivements. I was stuck in hospital for a few days recently and could read this continually, it was smashing. Recommended

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

A live, vivid, visceral book about travels in the Arabian desserts pre-oil. The author is amazing at capturing the fine details, the feelings, scents, sights, sounds of the moments and the beduoin people. It teleports the reader into a lost parallel world.
I don't think I've ever read something quite like it in richness, subtlety, capturing so well the ways of the bedu lifestyle, morals, customs, I never thought I'd find camels so fascinating.

Some of the passages so get a bit repetitive, but there's almost always golden nuggets to be found even in these. The book is worth reading slowly to savor it.

[Kiragu · Rating 1 out of 5]

The story is well told and I got to learn a bit about the recent history of Ethiopia and Sudan. Unfortunately, it seems the most important activity of the writer was to kill wild animals in his glorified hunting escapades. He declares he has no apologies. To think lions once roamed freely in places he went hunting, and that they now don't, sat poorly with me. His legacy is of a man who played a role in decimation of African wildlife for selfish gratification. And for that reason, I rate the book lowly.

[Bill Bell]

The third of Thesiger's books I've read. Yet I cannot imagine accompanying him for even a day on one of his excursions into a wilderness. In one book he mentions his abhorrence of anarchist and communist forces in Thirties Spain; I regret that he neglected to say why. The reasons for his similar feelings about the takeover of Abyssinia are made perfectly plain. Who could disagree? With the profusion of names of obscure, unfamiliar places and foreign words these are not easy reads.

[Kirk Astroth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding account of an remarkable life before modernity transformed the Middle East and Northern Africa. Thesiger was truly one of a kind who abhorred modern conveniences and was most comfortable camping in the outback and exploring little known places. Loved this book/autobiography and wish I could visit some of the places he traveled in present-day Ethiopia but sadly there are travel warnings.

[Miles Chicken · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Mengistu regime in Ethiopia was terrible, trained by East Germans. Wilfred's father died a sad death shaving.

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read half of the book, to be honest. Of course, it is very much written in a colonial setting, but knowing that, it is still an interesting read.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fantastic portrait of an explorer and adventurer.

With in depth insights into Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) just at the beginning of the 20th Century. It is at times hard to appreciate if you have little interest in that period in time around the region of Western Africa.

However if you do perceive the chapter with the details surrounding his time in the SOE towards the latter part of WWII is very interesting.

An fabulous account of an amazing man.

[Nion · Rating 4 out of 5]

几次探险中，深入Danakil领地的最精彩，穿插了不少奇风异俗。不过Thesiger的叙述有时会变得像log一样枯燥，接二连三的狩猎活动容易引起不适。能感受到他对土著文化的尊敬和善意但也觉得他的浪漫化赞赏有所局限。最喜欢part1，阿比西尼亚的历史、战争、古风胜利庆典和英格兰的生活形成的强烈反差让人如坠梦中，后面的单纯探险或SAS沙漠游击都没那么丰富的层次。作为一个不愿意在系统内升迁而只想被分配到帝国边缘去游历未知之地的人，Thesiger总能遇到通情达理的上级或同僚，有些人和他一样被土著文化吸引。全书高光是人间奇葩奥德.温盖特，通过先抑后扬，Thesiger把他写成了一个困在病态人格里的悲剧英雄，可能依旧讨人嫌，但或多或少能被理解。对于英国殖民的合理性，Thesiger有质疑但无深入。

[Denise Ferrary-Olson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this and Arabian Sands while I was living in Saudi Arabia and then Oman. I really enjoyed his writing, but, then again, I read all of T.E. Lawrence's opus and enjoyed them as well. Such interesting people...and so much themselves.

[Rowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Premise: Parents wanted a traditional English life for me, but that didn't feel right. My choice instead was to be like Lawrence of Arabia.

[Elisabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

very good on 'imperial' Ethiopia...read before going on trip. WF's penchant for young boys disturbing; hope he didn't do too much damage

[Alana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this man.

[David Kessler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wildred , the adventurer, lived quite the life. The Saudi desert story just kept me reading

[Alastair · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Thesiger, eccentricity, humility and wonderful adventure. I would make this the first Thesiger book you read as from there you can map all of his other amazing writings.

[Andy Sharp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thesiger's eye for detail and old school writing style took me back to many of the places I too visited as a young man some 30 years later.
He has captured the essence of the people he loved and respected as only someone can who has lived among them and shared their trials and tribulations.
A great adventure in a bygone era.