Among the Mountains: Travels Through Asia

(Paperback)

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Description

Wilfred Thesiger, this century's greatest living explorer, recalls his travels among the mountain ranges of Asia. Although Wilfred Thesiger is still largely associated with the Arabian deserts and the Marshes of Iraq, he has also travelled extensively at intervals, over the years, among mountains and mountain people in other remote areas of the Middle East and Asia. In 1987 Thesiger wrote: 'I have always been attracted by mountains...' And he observed more recently: 'Had I done nothing else as a traveller except my journeys in Nuristan, these alone would have amounted to something worthwhile'. Eventful, interesting and remarkable achievements in their own right, the Asian journeys -- among the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams and the Pamirs -- have inspired many of the finest photographs Thesiger has ever taken and contribute significantly to his standing as a great traveller and explorer. Spanning a period of over 30 years (1951-1983) this book draws on Thesiger's original diaries of his various journeys and his vivid memories of them, and includes some 80 or so previously unpublished photographs of the stunning mountain scenery he saw and the people he encountered.

Reviews

Praise for The Danakil Diary: '...a revelation. The diaries get us as close as we can now come to the camp fire around which Thesiger told his best stories' Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times Praise for Life of My Choice: 'One of the most engrossing life stories I have ever read' Richard Holmes, The Times

Author Bio

Wilfred Thesiger was born in 1910 at the British Legation in Addis Ababa, and spent his early years in Abyssinia. He was educated at Eton and Oxford. In World War I, serving with the patriots under Orde Wingate in Abyssinia, he was awarded a DSO. He later served with the SOE (in Syria) and the SAS in the Western Desert. Thesigers journeys have won him the Founders Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, the Lawrence of Arabia Medal of the Royal Central Asian Society, the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and the Burton Memorial Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society. His writing has won him the Heinemann Award; Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature; and Honorary DLitt from Leicester University and an Honorary DLitt from the University of Bath. In 1968 he was made CBE. He is Honorary Fellow of the British Academy and Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College, Oxford. He was honoured with a KBE in 1995. For over twenty years, until 1994, he lived mostly among the pastoral Samburu at Maralal in Northern Kenya. He died at the age of ninety-three in August 2003.