Customer Reviews

Life of My Choice

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This describes briefly his early years in Abyssinia (today Ethiopia and Eritria), followed even more briefly by his schooling in England, before it gets to the juicy stuff, in the form of his friendship with Haile Selassi, his explorations of the least well known corners of North Africa and Arabia, his service in the Sudan and in WW2 in the SAS. I think he's still alive, as I read an account of an interview of his a couple of years ago (1997 or so) and he was still going strong then. Until a few years ago was still living in Africa, where he had been living in a native village in Kenya for about 20 years. I would especially recommend this if you have read his 'Arabian Sands' or the 'Marsh Arabs', as it would give you a much more complete idea of who he actually was.

Wilfred Thesiger, I'm ashamed to admit, is a new discovery to me. After reading "Arabian Sands" a few days ago, I felt I had to learn more of his life. "The Life of My Choice" has many parallels to "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" and was so captivating that I had to read it in one sitting. T.E. Lawrence noted that "self-knowledge unfitted me for leadership." Thesiger puts that same sharp sword of introspection to his life. His observations on Lieutenant Colonel Orde Wingate and his thoughts on T.E. Lawrence are among the highlights of this book, as are his thoughts on Islam and Christianity.

A son of privilege, son of the Minister of the British Legation in Addis Ababa, the author fell in love with the people of the wilderness, and always found his heroes and soul mates among the harshest tribes in the most forbidding territories. He acknowledges that some of his big game hunting exploits don't go over well 50 years afterwards, but takes care to explain the realities of the situation. He obviously has a strong feeling for the underdog in any fight, not something to be taken for granted in a highly decorated battlefield veteran.

Thesiger's detailed account of the League of Nations standing by and watching the Italians brazenly use mustard gas on tens of thousands of Ethiopian soldiers and civilians reminds us of our own cowardice during more recent crimes against humanity.

In this age when we are in such great need of heroic figures, I have no knowledge of a single leader of Wilfred Thesiger's caliber alive among us. Then again, Thesiger insisted on not living inside his own society, not seeking to be known by anyone other than himself. No doubt he must serve as the model for more than a few yet to be discovered British and American heroes now posted in remote and dangerous places.

Surely one lesson to be taken from Mr. Thesiger's life is that we should live the lives our souls demand of us, consequences be damned. Mr. Thesiger realized as a young man that his path was a lonely one.

I highly recommend "Fire and the Sword in the Sudan" by Colonels Rudolph Slatin and F.R. Wingate to any reader of Wilfred Thesiger. Slatin was held prisoner for 12 years in the Sudan during the 1880s and early 1890s.

It was his choice. No marriage. Just adventure. It couldn't be mine. Yet one can be envious. Grant him his choice, and it's a great story. Grant him also that he's added something valuable to our better understanding of some important parts of the world that aren't so often understood. This is not the first book he wrote. He's a unique and remarkable man and author, a writer who grabs your interest and whisks you through several hundred pages. Books don't get much better than this.

It has been a few years since I read this book, so much of what I write has been pulled from my memory.

I heard an NPR review of "The Life of my Choice" and was moved to purchase the book. I was not disappointed. Thesiger takes you by the hand as he explores "The Dark Continent", from his childhood introduction to Halle Selassie to his life living among the nomadic people in the deserts of Northern Africa.

Adventures abound in this book. Written from the point of view of an old (and probably now dead!) British colonialist, it is a bit jaded at times. However, Thesiger truly appreciated the land and the people of Africa and found himself to prefer them to his refined contemporaries in England.

Wilfred Thesiger was the scion of a very influential English family; his uncle was the Viceroy of India, that is the highest British official governing what it is now India, Pakistan, Burma and Bangladesh.

Thesiger was born in Addis Abeba where his father was with the British legation; some of his earliest memories were of the German-inspired revolt during the first world war being put down. After boarding school and Oxford, he decided to spend his life exploring the most remote parts of the world, rather than a comparatively mundane career in the army or foreign service bureaucracy. He traveled through remote parts of Sudan (the Danakil territories), Iraq (among the Marsh Arabs), Afghanistan, and Arabia (Liwa, Yemen and elsewhere), where white men had never been before. He also fought with the SAS in Northern Africa - where Rommel probably came within 30 feet of him while he was hiding in the sand after being surprised on a commando mission - and then retired to Kenya.

To get a sense of what Thesiger was like - and of how our world has changed since his time - allow me to mention the deep disappointment with which he relates that at the outset of an expedition of his he knew that he would not be the first European to go to a particular corner of Ethiopia, because Portuguese Jesuits were known to have preached there in the 1600s, in a time when the Catholic church was trying to convert Coptic Ethiopia to Catholicism. In short, an extremely interesting life.

This is an incredible book and a most worthwhile antidote to our MTV - MacDonald's - couch potato society. I most heartily recommend this book.

Wilfred Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa, Abyssina (Ethiopia) in 1910, the son of the first British Ambassador to the country. He describes his childhood experiences, watching the tribesmen arrive in Addis for festival, bedecked in a feral aura. Much of this book is about Ethiopia, and his life there, and he quotes Edward Gibbons: "...encompassed on all sides by the enemies of their religion, the Aethiopians slept near a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they were forgotten." Therein lay the fascination for Thesiger, one that I certainly shared. He seemed to be marked, far more than would be possible from an "astrological sign," by his place of birth, and his childhood there; his life would be a continuing pursuit to see the last of the wild places on earth before modernity encroached, with its relentless homogenizing influences, or, as he says in the subject quote at the end of the epilogue, "...to have been there just in time." He wrote 10 books, primarily about his travel experiences in Southwest Asia and Africa, with "Arabian Sands" and "The Marsh Arabs" being the most famous. He took some 25,000 photographs, and they provide an indispensable historical record. This book briefly covers the time period in which he wrote his best works, but that is all; there are no real additional insights.

The author covers the revolution in Ethiopia in 1916-17, and the eventual coronation of Haile Selassie as Emperor. His father was a personal friend of the man, and the son's effusive praise for the Emperor is certainly excessive, even pandering. A useful antidote would be to read "The Emperor," by Ryszard Kapuscinski, which covers the last days in the life of this megalomaniac. Thesiger has a "very" English aspect to his manner and outlook, as would have been instilled by his education at Eton and Oxford, during the days of "high Empire." There is a youthful picture of him in the book, which today would be assumed to be a parody, but then was simply the way it was: he is standing in front of an African hut, wearing a pith helmet, a "safari" jacket and tie, shorts, knee socks, and holding two lion cubs. It is a useful image to retain when one is reading of his various adventures in the remotest areas.

Thesiger established his explorer "credentials" by his venture into "Danakil country," the lowlands of eastern Ethiopia. They were largely unexplored, even into the `30's of the previous century, due to the inhabitant's penchant for castrating non-tribal males in order to provide bon fides of their own manhood. After exploring other regions of Ethiopia, he went to French Somaliland (now Djibouti), then undertook an extensive exploration of the Sudan, including now topical Darfur. He also undertook a journey to the mountains of Tibesti, in then French Algeria. A fair portion of the book is devoted to his service in the British military during World War II, in this "backwater" of the war, and starts with his coverage of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, which was one of the first acts of WW II, and goes through its liberation by British forces, and Thesiger's service under General Wingate, which included extensive travels in the Levant, and the Western Sahara desert.

Only a slender portion of the book is devoted to the post-WW II era, when he wrote his two most famous books, which involved his two crossings of the Rub Al Khali (the Empty Quarter) of Saudi Arabia, and his travels with the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq. He eventually "retired" to live in a small hut in northern Kenya, far from the traditional British "settings" in the "White Highlands."

This book is certainly a worthwhile read, but I have trouble giving it the full 5-stars. Thesiger tends to over-romanticize the life and virtues of those untainted by Western "civilization"; there is the above-described picture of him, which haunts the imagination as to his upper British class outlook toward the "native classes." He describes his visit to England during the worst years of the Great Depression, yet his upper class background seems to make him totally oblivious to the impact it has had on his fellow citizens. And finally, there is that from which so many tend to avert their eyes due to his explorer status - all too often he describes his "affection" for a very youthful, male companion, be it in the Sudan, the final days in Kenya, or in crossing the Rub Al-Khali. How did that "color" his outlook, and provide motivation for his travels? It is unexplained in this book. Overall though, an important book, a solid 4-star read.

This is a great read by Thesiger. Much like Arabian Sands, though focusing on Eastern Africa, it reads with the deprecation we've come to expect of the great British explorers. If you like Thesiger, this will not disappoint.

Thesiger's "Life" has the primary benefit of any well-written story by a not-quite-native person who was privileged to be accepted in a strange land -- it takes you someplace new and mysterious. On that basis, I found the book to be very good, an insider view of a place, culture, and terrain I'll never experience myself. As with so many wandering sons of the British Empire, such as T. E. Lawrence and Sir Richard Burton, you get a good feel for the place and time, albeit inevitably filtered through the author's personal prejudices and social values.

Thesiger is less a scholar than either Lawrence or Burton, and less able to stand back and place his experiences of Africa in historical, religious, and artistic contexts. Still, he was present at a time when colonialism was fading and new nations were being formed, living out the old Chinese curse/blessing, "may you live in interesting times." Anyone with an interest in Africa as it is in modern times can't help but be curious as to how things got the way they are, at least in the areas he was familiar with.

My only real quibble may be unfair. I'm no scholar of exploration writings, but none I've read that were written by men give particular insight into the lives of African women, certainly not to nearly the degree they do of African men. I realize Thesiger, like any male, would not have much access to the lives of women in cultures where women's existences were so restricted to hearth and home. Still, it's sad to only get half the story of this vanished past, especially since a handful of female explorers did manage to penetrate the life of the veil. Sadly, their books are much less read, although often better written. It must be said, though, that Thesiger in particular shows an astounding lack of interest in women in general, reserving all his descriptive powers and personal observations for the pageantry and color of warrior displays.

However, I did finish the book with a better understanding of fundamental differences between Arab north Africa and the rest of the continent. I recommend this book as worthwhile, but best read in context with others written both before Thesiger's time and since. Thesiger's views alone strike me as a little crotchety, a bit too much of an old man resenting how much the world has changed. It never seems to occur to him that the land he so enjoyed, and in which he was privileged to come and go as he pleased as a white sahib, had a cost to it's less fortunate inhabitants. The life he regrets losing is, in some ways, a better life for larger numbers of people than it was in his time.