The Last Nomad: One Man's Forty Year Adventure in the World's Most Remote Deserts, Mountains and Marshes [Hardcover]

Wilfred Thesiger (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: E. P. Dutton; 1st edition (March 31, 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525930779
• ISBN-13: 978-0525930778
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #671,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars FORGET ARABIAN SANDS, this is the book you want!, April 14, 2008

By 

DM (ORegon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Nomad: One Man's Forty Year Adventure in the World's Most Remote Deserts, Mountains and Marshes (Hardcover)

While waiting for my inter-library loan of Arabian Sands to show up I pulled this, The Last Nomad, off my librarys shelf. Turns out they are the same book! Same tho only in text. The Last Nomad is a big 20" x 20" book filled with big beautiful black and white photos Some full page and a few even two page spreads. Tho they do suffer from being black and white imho, Wilfred Thesiger is an excellent photographer. The "portraits" of the people are wonderful.

This is the book to get. FORGET ARABIAN SANDS. Arabian Sands is a small 7.8 x 5.1 book with small pictures. And not all the pictures to boot.

My favorite part was the Iraq Marshes (1950-'58). The stunning "buildings" the Marsh Arabs made solely from the TWENTY foot tall reeds that grew there. WOW.
This is the area where the rivers Tigris and Euphrates join, and is thought by some to be the original site of the Garden of Eden.

"The 5,000-year-old way of life of the Marsh Arabs, celebrated by Wilfred Thesiger among others, has long been under threat. Its final disappearance is documented in 'The Iraqi Marshlands' edited by Emma Nicholson and Peter Clark. Saddam Hussein's aggressive drainage programme in the 1990s, in pursute of rebels hiding in the waterways, turned much of the marshland into desert, depopulating the area. Some 200,000 of the inhabitants fled, many of them to refugee camps in Iran. The damage is probably irretrievable."

Dams in Turkey, Syria and Iran have further reduce the amount of water flowing down the Tigris and Euphrates. All the bird and wildlife is lost. Latest satellite images show that less than 7% of the Mesopotamian marshes now remain intact.

What confuses me is the contrast between the various "modern" tribes and the stunningly huge, beautiful and complex brick buildings built thousands of years ago by their ancestors. I can't seem to connect the two. What happened to them? How is it possible to regress so?

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars lots of information hidden in stories of travels, July 21, 2009

By 

rose rickard (northern california) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Nomad: One Man's Forty Year Adventure in the World's Most Remote Deserts, Mountains and Marshes (Hardcover)

Enjoying this book. One reviewer said that this book has 3 or 4 of the author's writings in this book. It is true. For nearly the same price as a one book paperback of Mr Thesiger, I received a coffeetable book with lots of big pictures. It was a delightful bonus. Am most grateful for your reviewer's comments and information. Thanks for the nice service Amazon. Book is in good condition and arrived well before its due date. My only wish might be that it could have had color photographs, but the black and white are quite stunning.

5.0 out of 5 stars The Last Nomad, January 6, 2012

By 

Simon R. Mouer "Professor" (Austin TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Last Nomad: One Man's Forty Year Adventure in the World's Most Remote Deserts, Mountains and Marshes (Hardcover)

I read Thesiger's "Arabian Sands" many years ago, back in the late '70's or early '80's while stationed in Saudi Arabia. I read a copy from our "desert library," so I didn't buy my own copy. I was quite thrilled to see this large format book being offered on Amazon, and ordered a copy immediately.

I agree with previous posters that the "Last Nomad" is the premier book to buy, and has all the content, and more, of Thesiger's other books, including Arabian sands, trips into Iraqi marshes, and the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The narrative is interesting, and the large, numerous photos are priceless. You can look back through Thesiger's prose and pictures, of a life that hadn't changed for a thousand years or more.

If you want to get a picture of why the Middle East and surroundings are so volatile today, this book will help you understand that it has always been that way. Even today, some of the rural areas Thisinger traveled through have not changed a lot, except maybe to acquire some improved weaponry.

This is an essential book for historians and priceless acquisition for the layman.