Customer Reviews

Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert

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Travel books can be a mixed bag, with the narrators themselves sometimes making for unpleasant company on the armchair journey. That is not a problem with "Sahara Unveiled," where author William Langewiesche submerges himself well beneath the thread of the story.

Langewiesche, a reporter for "Atlantic Monthly" best known today for his "American Ground" series of pieces on the aftermath of the World Trade Center's destruction, writes in a lean, spare, slightly alkaline style reminiscent of Hemingway that seems to suit his subject, the world's biggest and perhaps most ferocious desert, quite well. It puts one in mind of William Least Heat Moon's travel writing, notably "Blue Highways," with its cultural detours and picaresque, ever-changing cast of characters.

Langewiesche starts off by quickly dispelling any myths his readers might have about the subject of the Sahara: "Do not regret the passing of the camel and the caravan. The Sahara has changed, but it remains a desert without compromise, the world in its extreme." He goes on to demonstrate this by trekking through the desert's endless mass and then west to the Atlantic primarily by taxi, bus, and riverboat.

It's not clear to me why Langewiesche was doing this (Least Heat Moon had similarly opaque motives), and the locals have questions, too. During one layover in the Algerian town of M'Zab, what he calls "the diving board for the deep Sahara," there is the following exchange as Langewiesche looks for ground transport farther south:

"He said: 'Why don't you fly?'

'Because I want to see the desert up close.'

'Buy a postcard.'

'But I want to feel the desert.'

'It feels bad.'

Indeed it does. Sometimes it can even be fatal. Death, human and otherwise, is of no importance to the Sahara, devourer of whole towns and caravans. "The Sahara is not cruel, but it is indifferent," he writes. And it produces a sometimes indifferent people, hard, lean, and fatalistic.

People who attack Langewiesche for a lack of political correctness in depicting the Arabs, Berbers, Tauregs, Moors, and others he describes in these pages pay a glowing tribute without knowing it. Langewiesche is one tough writer, unsentimental, not macho but not running for office, either. When he has cause to describe the generosity and kindness of people he meets, he does so. When he runs into less decent folk, he doesn't mince words. He doesn't waste them, either, on emotional outbursts or self-righteousness. As I said at the beginning, he's one author who doesn't get in the way of what he's talking about.

His take on the Europeans who come to the Sahara are sharp and cutting. He notes meeting a miserable French couple collecting scorpions and tales of injured superiority in Algeria, a former French colony: "She was a Parisian, and too young to remember the old Algerian war. But she had picked up the old colonial habit of talking about the Algerians as if they were not present or didn't understand French. Similarly, she wore a short skirt and a sleeveless shirt, and through the thin fabric displayed her nipples in disregard of local sentiment. And now she sat drinking French wine. These were not acts of indifference, but aggression. And Algerians understood the difference."

The best thing about "Sahara Unveiled" is it never sits still for long. Langewiesche can spend a few pages talking about the fate of a misguided missionary in the 1800s, then bring things back to the present day with an analysis of Taureg separatist violence. He analyzes the different types of dunes formed by Saharan sand, how the desert resembles an ocean, and how it does not. He relates folk tales and the anatomy of a camel. Using plainspoken and approachable prose, he manages to take deep stock of a variety of subjects, make his point, and move on.

The last leg of the journey is a quick one, perhaps because Langewiesche was taken ill (from drinking the water, a classic tourist mistake). He doesn't wrap it up as well as he should have, but the rest of the book is too good to begrudge him anything for that. Complaining the author left you wanting more is not much of a complaint, is it?

You will enjoy this account of nature at its extreme, and the people who live in it. It is an armchair journey worth taking.

Have you ever wanted to escape from the daily routine of the world? Ever wished to travel to a remote destination with nothing but a backpack and na adventurous spirit to rely on? Is your answer is yes, then you can probably quench that craving - even if only vicariously - by reading William Langewiesche's `Sahara Unveiled'. What starts off as just another travel book quickly speeds up in the middle chapters to become a wonderful work of non-fiction, narrowly bordering on religion, history, philosophy, politics, and anthropology as the author paints a harrowingly realistic picture of his journey across the desert. If on the one hand the book lacks warmth (as ludicrous as that may sound it being a narrative on the Sahara), and the author's attitude reveals a tinge of cold impersonality, one must also admit that that very attitude allows the reader to see the adventure from a first-person perspective. The descriptions are colourful and the writer has what appears to be an innate talent for defining the characters, for their essences and spirits can be clearly distinguished throughout. The chapters follow Langewiesche's route from Algiers to Dakar, stopping at dozens of towns, villages, oases and settlements that dot the vast seas of gravel and sand. Definitely ranking among the best travel books ever written, `Sahara Unveiled - A Journey Across The Desert' is a worthwhile read, coming as something of a shock to all those who picture the Sahara as just one vast, lifeless expanse.

At some point in this brilliant piece, the author states that writers write about the desert for the same reason that readers read about it: to fulfill their curiousity. The vast majority of us have neither the courage nor the time to travel through the Sahara and we should all thank Mr. Langewiesche for making this journey for us. And we should all complement him on just how he has shared this incredible experience. By weaving in African myths, Saharan individuals, details of science and his own musings, Mr. Langewiesche has created a masterpiece. If you have ever been interested in learning about the desert, you must read it to enjoy and to satisfy your curiousity. And if you have not, you should read it to expand your horizons.

A travel narrative classic: Mr. Langewiesche provides a vivid picture of the formidable Sahara. Every chapter of the journey brings us new surprises and aspects about this arid landscape. From the safari to physics of sand dunes, this book introduces us the anthropology, archaeology, meterology, geography, geology and history of the desert. Get ready and let's begin this eye-opening virtual tour of the Sahara!

Very, very good book about author's 1990(?) trip from Algiers south through the Sahara desert into Niger, Mali and Senegal. He has apparently spent a fair amount of time in Algeria and had been to much of the Algerian desert prior to the trip he recounts in this book (actually, many of the anecdotes he tells are from previous trips). He nicely mixes in digressions on science (physics of sand dunes, ecology of scorpions, desertification) with his history and sociology. Langewiesche seems particularly keen to de-romanticize the Sahara, and spends a great deal of time chiding the French for doing so. A nice travel book which captures the terror of the desert quite well. I recommend not reading on once he exits the Algerian desert. He speeds through the final portion of the trip and has taken to heart the writer's adage that no ending is better than a bad ending!

What a fabulous book. This one is destined to become a travel classic along with the best of fellow pilot Saint-Exupery. Having lived in West Africa, I was on the look-out for a false step, or glibness, and never found it. Langewiesche considers his subjects with fairness and a keen eye. He never condescends. He caught the mood of the desert beautifully without ever romanticizing or demonizing it. What a coup.

I have been able to talk about nothing but this book for the past week and am forcing it on every literate person I know. But hey - a book this good is an easy sell.

Nothing lives for hundreds of miles in the vast Tanzenrouft of Adrar, where the annual rainfall is less than an inch, the daily temperature is 128oF, there is no shade, and the sky is nearly white. The Great Eastern Erg of El Oued is a literal sand sea, uninhabitable except in sparse areas where survival depends on a kind of "farming:" a lifetime of days removing sand by shovel and bulldozer to protect the date palms and the entire city itself from burial.

William Langewiesche, in his travel memoir, Sahara Unveiled, never gives a reason for his journey, but only that: "The Sahara is not a natural destination and never will be. A writer writes about it, as a reader reads about it, to satisfy his curiosity about an unseen part of the world." He doesn't try to explain the allure of the Sahara as Paul Bowles did, especially in terms of the immense silence of the dunes at night, the profound solitude, the confrontation of one's own insignificance - the very things that Western culture was built to obscure. Like William Vollman in Atlas or Butterfly Stories (or Melville...or embedded journalists) Langewiesche abandons the instinct for self-preservation in search of his story. The result is a rich view from the inside of the geographical landscape and its inhabitants, considered within an historical context.

For example, in Tadart, a hostile, remote region near the Algerian border with Libya, in search of ancient rock paintings, Langewiesche finds himself deceived and abandoned in a desolate area by his driver, a self-aggrandizing Tuareg with embroidered pants and white aviator scarf who will "watch himself in any reflection." Until then, the driver's romantic depictions of himself are pretty funny, such as when they blow out a tire: "Don't worry." He held two fingers together. "This is how I am with the desert. If you love a woman she can never hurt you. The desert is my woman." He went on to explain his hatred for American women: in 1992, after American scientists discovered that exercise was bad for them, they still did it. He says, "Someday you will introduce me. I will ravage them. I will make them beg for my love." Of which Langewiesche writes: "I doubted it."

Other characters include John Stingely, a lone Oregonian forester remaining in Mauritania after the rest of the Peace Corps left due to sickness and discouragement, still trying to cultivate saplings of mesquite and acacia he hoped could relieve some of the region's poverty. And Lag-Lag, an aged drunk who twice survived being lost in the Eastern Erg, and Ameur Belouard, nicknamed the King of Ouargla, who lived a double life and left chaos behind when he died unexpectedly. A date farmer insisting that milk and dates are all a person needs to survive, whether raw from the branches, dried, baked, boiled, or fried, and whose hydrologist partner explained that in America, research at a big university revealed that dates "help against cancer."

In addition to the truth about Timbuktu, we learn the sand dunes: the barchan, crescent-shaped with projecting shallow horns and a gentle windward slope and steep leeward face, advancing by small avalanches, and the seif, the parallel serpent-like dunes arising from bi-directional winds. (I'll admit this: I actually had to find a copy of The Physics of Blown Sand!). We learn classifications of thirst: eudipsia (ordinary thirst), hyperdipsia (temporary intense thirst) and polydipsia (the kind of thirst that will drive you to drink anything, such as radiator water, gasoline, urine, and finally, blood); the material properties of adobe; and the horrible fate of a Belgian family who became lost south of Tamanrasset, the details preserved in the wife's journal, which the judge of the province allowed Langewiesche to peruse.

We learn that the glorified nomadic Tuaregs invaded the central Sahara from the north 3,500 years ago, and in the Middle Ages converted to a form of Islam. Opportunistic raiders and herders, they siphoned from the prosperous trade routes between richer African civilizations and the Mediterranean, but were eventually conquered by French colonialism around the turn of the century. The ancestors of today's Fulani nomads were cattle herders that migrated from possibly Ethiopia around 5,000 B.C. and introduced a rich period of art. Around 1500 B.C. light skinned Berber warriors from the north, probably ancestors of the Tuaregs, enslaved the remaining cattle herders, whose descendants now represent 90% of central Saharan society and form the bottom of the rigid Turareg hierarchy.

Langewiesche is a fully trustable writer: he doesn't try to glorify anything, but allows a vision to emerge of the resilience of life and the existence of something where nothing is granted out of such brutal sparseness. The whole thing fits together well: the textured but restrained (and even poetic) prose helps evoke the landscape. The entries are not dated, and the time between Algiers and the novel's oddly abrupt ending in Dakar is unclear. But there must have been a lot more in the original journals and writings - and you wish he'd included it.

An excellent book: one of the best pieces of travel literature I've read in a long time. Mr Langewiesche is keenly observant and brutally honest. In his book he has brought to life the stark beauty of the desert and its people, in a synthesis of life and art. In my view, he has joined the ranks of great contemporary American writers. Let us rejoice!

Sahara Unveiled was one of the most interesting books in a long time. Langewiesche travels through Algeria, Mali, and into Senegal. Also included is a fascinating chapter taking place in Mauritania, a country for which there doesn't seem to be much interest. This book is not just a travel book about the author's adverture through a relatively remote area, it is also an education about the desert; the effects it has on the lives of its habitants. Langewiesche explains how the desert has influenced various cultures as well as the effect it had on him. The author raises issues of history, geography, and culture in a manner which is both entertaining and educational. I only wish the book was longer.

sahara unveiled is a beautiful description of a stark environment, but travelers wanting to be talked into a desert excursion should avoid this book. langewieshe is frank in his vignettes describing the natural and human dangers of desert travel, the contempt for westerners he found in various african countries, the crass autocracy of customs officials in bunkers located -- quite literally -- in the middle of nowhere. some passages are riotously funny, others tragic: the whole of this book is poetry.