Customer Reviews

Glory in a Camel's Eye: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert

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tayler is a keen observer of humankind, erudite, articulate, fair-minded. i stumbled on this book and now look forward to reading everything he's written.

Instead of being subtitled "A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert", this book should have been subtitled "The Dangers of Trying to Recreate Your Favorite Explorer Tales".

Isn't there a line in "Lawrence of Arabia" about Lawrence being one of those "desert loving English". What we have here is the tale of a Arabic-speaking modern American who has fallen in love with the desert and the explorer tales of traveling with Bedouins across Arab's Empty Quarter, so naturally as a writer, he wants to recreate this hero's journey so he can write about it. And while he does make it all the way across the Moroccan Sahara to the Atlantic Ocean, even across Western Sahara where there's a war on and it's heavily mined and they really don't want tourists, he spares us none of the messy discomfort and all of the wonder. His paragraph on buying green, fly-specked meat in a market is longer than the section on the 10 different local words for desert.