The Life of My Choice

London: Collins, 1987. First Edition. Octavo in black boards, gilt titles to spine; dust jacket; 459 pp: 32 unnumbered pages of plates, maps; 24 cm Fine in fine dust jacket; a clean and tight copy; dust jacket is protected in archival mylar. Hardcover. ISBN: 9780002161947

Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) was a British explorer, soldier, and travel writer best known for his austere journeys across some of the most inhospitable regions of Arabia and East Africa in the mid-twentieth century. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he rejected metropolitan life in favor of prolonged immersion among nomadic societies, most famously the Bedu (Bedouin)of the Empty Quarter (Arabia), whose culture he documented with rare intimacy and respect in works such as Arabian Sands. Thesiger combined physical endurance with an ethnographer’s eye and a classical stoicism, recording landscapes and lifeways then on the brink of disappearance under modernity. His prose, spare and unsentimental, reflects a moral seriousness and personal code shaped by hardship, loyalty, and a deep skepticism toward comfort, progress, and the consolations of the modern world. | Adventure and adventurers, Adventure and adventurers Great Britain Biography, Biographies, Biography, Great Britain, Middle East Travel Thesiger, Wilfred - Biographies,WonderWon