Customer Reviews

Sahara: An Immense Ocean of Sand

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For all those who have glimpsed the great wilderness of the Sahara Desert-and for those who have imagined it-this book will open new dimensions. There is no doubt about it; this is the BEST pictorial on the Sahara desert in print. It describes the world's most fascinating and oldest desert in depth, highlighting its many diverse aspects through a collection of stunning photographs. The portrait pictures of the Tuareg tribes are my favorite. They are so powerful it is hard to take your eyes off the faces portrayed in the book. The features of the women are simply astounding. The book has a great layout and is split into information sections in a concise way covering history, traditions, life style and so on. It stands out as a great picture book but comes really on top for the way it integrates a lot of written information without losing the glossy "coffee-table" feel. Buy it, you'll love it. It would definitely make you want to visit all these places and travel where the authors have ventured. The print quality is superb and it has a lot of full page pictures which the lack of is something I find frustrating in pictorial books on similar subjects. You really get to appreciate the desert vastness and details. There are 500 color illustrations in 300 pages. You get so much for a great price, once again get that one if you can.

As a biologist who grew up in the desert I am always interested in good book on deserts and of late I have been in search of one or more good books on the Sahara. Such books are damnably hard to find (even more so for the Gobi, the Atacama, the Namib, the Taklamakan, or the Kara Kum.) It was thus with some reluctance that I ordered "Sahara: An Immense Ocean of Sand" by Paolo Novaresio and Gianni Guadalupi. I knew it was a coffee table book, and with few exceptions ("Galaxies" and "Leaves" come to mind) these are often over produced and not very informative.

This was definitely not true of the present volume as the photography is wonderful and the text is quite good on the whole. The authors seem to generally know their stuff (I can quibble about the sand viper, Cerastes vipera, being called the horned viper, Cerastes cerastes, but they are at least in the same genus!) In general I was much impressed by this book and will keep it as a reference, especially on the peoples and landscape of the Sahara. The photo of the fenic on a sand dune and the photos of mountains, sand dunes and oases were well worth the price of the book!

I am now looking for a book on the folklore of the Sahara, but not finding any! The jinn and Lilith must be out there somewhere!

However, this is a nicely done introduction to this vast desert, equal in size to the whole United Statrs. I recommend it.