Yemen
Dec 2011 · Hachette UK
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304
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About this ebook
Arguably the most fascinating but least known country in the Arab world, Yemen has a way of attracting comment that ranges from the superficial to the wildly fictitious.
In Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, Tim Mackintosh-Smith writes with an intimacy and depth of knowledge gained through over twenty years among the Yemenis. He is a travelling companion of the best sort - erudite, witty and eccentric. Crossing mountain, desert, ocean and three millennia of history, he portrays hyrax hunters and dhow skippers, a noseless regicide, and a sword-wielding tyrant with a passion for Heinz Russian salad. Yet even the ordinary Yemenis are extraordinary: their family tree goes back to Noah and is rooted in a land which, in the words of a contemporary poet, has become the dictionary of its people. Every page of this book is dashed - like the land it describes - with the marvellous.
In Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, Tim Mackintosh-Smith writes with an intimacy and depth of knowledge gained through over twenty years among the Yemenis. He is a travelling companion of the best sort - erudite, witty and eccentric. Crossing mountain, desert, ocean and three millennia of history, he portrays hyrax hunters and dhow skippers, a noseless regicide, and a sword-wielding tyrant with a passion for Heinz Russian salad. Yet even the ordinary Yemenis are extraordinary: their family tree goes back to Noah and is rooted in a land which, in the words of a contemporary poet, has become the dictionary of its people. Every page of this book is dashed - like the land it describes - with the marvellous.
Ratings and reviews
5.0
3 reviews
About the author
Tim Mackintosh-Smith lives in San'a, in a house lit by alabaster windows and standing on the ruin-mound of the ancient Sabaean city. His forays out of the mountains of Yemen have taken him to many parts of the wider Islamic world between Morocco and China, on the trail of the fourteenth-century traveller Ibn Battutah, resulting in three books: Travels with a Tangerine, The Hall of a Thousand Columns and Landfalls. He has also presented a BBC television series on these journeys. He has translated a number of works on Yemeni history from Arabic into English and vice versa and is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.
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