Desert Places [Paperback]

Robyn Davidson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 1997

In 1992 Robyn Davidson traveled through a year's migratory cycle with the Rabari, pastoral nomads of northwest India, whose grazing lands and trading and pilgrimage routes are quickly being destroyed by new political boundaries, atomic test sites, and irrigation. Sleeping among five thousand sheep and surviving on goat's milk, flatbread, and parasite-infested water in a landscape of misery and haunting loveliness, she endured exhaustion, malnutrition and disease. But she gained an understanding and the trust of a fiercely courageous people with a disappearing way of life.

Displaying a writer's acute eye for detail and a traveler's keen appreciation for the beauty to be found in the earth's most desolate landscapes, Davidson explores with ruthless honesty her own desert places even as she immortalizes these "keepers of the way" and a culture about to die. Fans of Bruce Chatwin, Peter Mathiessen, and Mary Morris will find themselves enthralled by the passion and beauty of this account by a woman traveler who "may be one of the great adventurers of our time" (The Boston Globe).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As Robyn Davidson writes in Desert Places, the Thar, a 230,000-square-mile expanse of formidably dry country in northwestern India, is a harsh land of "granite outcroppings, naked but for a few gullies of monsoon forest or a single, white-painted elephant stationed on a summit eternally surveying the farmlands below." Among the people who populate the Thar are the Rabari, who are quickly becoming modernized and dispossessed, wanderers on the fringes of urban civilization, people who are at home nowhere. After making a false start as a book of adventure travel, Desert Places becomes a work of cultural ecology and of amateur anthropology, reporting on the final days of a traditional nomadic culture once utterly at home in an inhospitable land. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Inspired by an enchanting encounter with camel herdsmen at a Hindu festival in Pushkar, travel writer Davidson (Tracks) took a magazine assignment to accompany the nomads of Rajasthan (a region in western India) on their yearly migration cycle. Arriving in Jodhpur on the eve of the Gulf war under the aegis of her friend Narendra, a prince who equips her with an entourage of servants and an obstreperous camel-keeper named Chutra, Davidson soon discovers that the ancient culture of the nomads (who are known either as Rabari or as Raika) is slowly being eradicated, faced with diminishing grazing lands, new political boundaries and the spread of subsidized agriculture and Western culture. This book, as breathtaking but circuitous as the adventures it chronicles, begins to gather steam when Davidson is finally accepted by a dang (a migratory group) and sets off to follow them across the desert. She spends a few months sharing the shepherds' life of extreme deprivation, traveling 30 miles a day on a diet of little more than fetid water and camel's milk, sleeping two hours a night and battling illness and exhaustion, before deciding to return to Jodhpur on foot?which proves an even more perilous journey that ends when her camels die after eating poisonous weeds. By the book's end, Davidson's romantic vision of the peripatetic life has given way to a bitter account of her own dashed expectations and of the exploitation of India's nomads. Although her understanding of nomadism as an emotional and geographical phenomenon remains only partly digested, this book will nevertheless prove absorbing to even the most sedentary of bookshelf-travelers.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (November 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140267972
• ISBN-13: 978-0140267976
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,468,124 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unparalleled, March 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Desert Places (Paperback)

This is the most honest, earthy, exhilarating account of an expedition that I've ever come upon. In a sense, I've seen more of Rajasthan through Davidson's story than during my own brief treck into the Thar.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A tough book, March 20, 2000

By 

saliero (NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Desert Places (Paperback)

Ms Davidson is a tough woman, who for some reason sees the need to put herself into the most excrutiatingly isolating situations.

I found the book fascinating, and was overwhelmed at times by the sense of being so alone within a country where there is the most confronting closeness of human being with human being. This is an India I know i would not be equipped to deal with.

i was a bit critical of her at first that she always had her friend, the wealthy Indian upon whom to fall back, but I doubt whether she would have been able to approach completion of her task without him. The need to retreat every so often from the sheer hard grind of trying to accomplish the task she set herself. I know i would have had to find a 5 star, deep-bath resort long before Davidson welcomed the comfort of a barely basic hotel room with hot water!

The lives of the rabbari as presented to us through Davidson's eyes (and god knows they are hardly likely to be presented any other way!) is fascinating. I know the attraction of the 'exotic' can lead to patronising people, but davidson never does that, and does not allow her (dare i suggest, midle class, western, educated?) readership to get too comfortable with their own views of the world.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ex-pat review, August 30, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Desert Places (Paperback)

I spent 2 years in India in the late 90s and this book began making its' way around the ex-pat crowd in the middle of my stay there. The word of mouth reviews were universally positive. While most of us didn't go through the extreme day to day challenges Ms. Davidson put herself through, we went through enough to completely empathize with her plights. Her eloquent descriptions of the often unending and unyielding discomforts imposed by India while, at the same time, it also offered the visitor delights and experiences you can't find anywhere else was simply spot-on. I recommend this book to anyone who truly enjoys travels and the self-reflection afforded through trips that take them out of their comfort zones.