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Desert Places
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Desert Places
Author: Robyn Davidson

Book Information
Publisher: Penguin Books
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Rating:
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ISBN-13: 9780140267976 - ISBN-10: 0140267972
Publication Date: 11/1/1997
Pages: 288


Other Versions of this Book: Hardcover

Book Description:
* Robyn Davidson's previous book, Tracks, won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award In 1992 Robyn Davidson traveled through a year's migratory cycle with the Rabari, pastoral nomads of northwest India, whose grazing lands and trading and pilgrimage routes are quickly being destroyed by new political boundaries, atomic test sites, and irrigation. Sleeping among five thousand sheep and surviving on goat's milk, flatbread, and parasite-infested water in a landscape of misery and haunting loveliness, she endured exhaustion, malnutrition and disease. But she gained an understanding and the trust of a fiercely courageous people with a disappearing way of life. Displaying a writer's acute eye for detail and a traveler's keen appreciation for the beauty to be found in the earth's most desolate landscapes, Robyn Davidson explores with ruthless honesty her own desert places even as she immortalizes these keepers of the way and a culture about to die. Fans of Bruce Chatwin, Peter Mathiessen, and Mary Morris will find themselves enthralled by the passion and beauty of this account by a woman traveler who may be one of the great adventurers of our time (The Boston Globe).

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Top Member Book Reviews

Matt B. (BuffaloSavage) wrote on 10/14/2008...

2 member(s) found this review helpful.

In her second outstanding travel narrative, Hitchcock confronts the realities of a desert environment in Rajasthan, poverty among nomads, and her own motivations for grueling sojourns. As she experiences the roughness, instability, and danger of life among pastoralists, Hitchcock reads Proust and comes to grips with her own 41-year-old selfhood. She examines with honesty the experience of being the object of curiosity by mobs of children and lewdness of men (her guide-bodyguards were so disgusted that they'd yell out, "What if somebody gawked at your sister like this, you half-minds"). Most interesting to me (a former traveler and ESL teacher) is her description of how the language barrier was an obstacle in her dealings with locals. To my mind, few travel writers are as ruthlessly honest with themselves and readers about language inability. A tough Australian, Hitchcock never approaches the belllyachin' tone of road-weary Yanks or Poms.


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