Cover of The Marsh Arabs

The Marsh Arabs

During the years he spent among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq-long before they were almost completely wiped out by Saddam Hussein-Wilfred Thesiger came to understand, admire, and share a way of life that had endured for many centuries. Traveling from village to village by canoe, he won acceptance by dispensing medicine and treating the sick. In this account of a nearly lost civilization, he pays tribute to the hospitality, loyalty, courage, and endurance of the people, and describes their impressive reed houses, the waterways and lakes teeming with wildlife, the herding of buffalo and hunting of wild boar, moments of tragedy, and moments of pure comedy in vivid, engaging detail.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 256 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked The Marsh Arabs? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked The Marsh Arabs. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. The Road to Oxiana Shares travel, nonfiction, Middle East
  2. The Sindbad Voyage Shares travel, nonfiction, history
  3. Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah Shares travel, Middle East, nonfiction
  4. The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels Shares travel, nonfiction, Middle East

“People who read The Marsh Arabs tend to reach for these next.”

  1. A Winter in Arabia
  2. Brazilian Adventure
  3. Arabia
  4. The Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold

“If you want more of the same (travel about islam), start with these.”

  1. Return To The Marshes
  2. A Reed Shaken by the Wind: Travels among the Marsh Arabs of Iraq
  3. Baghdad Sketches
  4. From the Meadows of Gold

“If it was the Middle East that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. The Olive Route: A Personal Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean
  2. Ghost Towns of Route 66
  3. Where the West Ends
  4. In Xanadu: A Quest

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl about Love
  2. Liz at Marigold Lake
  3. The Land I Lost: Adventures of a Boy in Vietnam
  4. Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch