The Desert and the Sown: Travels in Palestine and Syria

This is essentially a travelogue written in 1907 by an English woman, traveling through what is now Israel, Jordan, Lebanon Syria and Turkey but was then all part of the Ottoman Empire. She traveled "alone" in the sense that she had no English friends/colleagues traveling with her. She only had her local Arab and/or Bedouin guides. Think of this book as an extended National Geographic issue of that region. The photographs alone are worth buying the book. But the most important part of the book is its relevance to today's situation in the Middle East, in terms of getting a better understanding of the tribal customs and relationships, and the fact that these countries do not have a centuries-old tradition of nationhood. There is no "plot" to the book... again, it is a travelogue, but a fascinating one, especially when taking into account the courage of Gertrude Bell, who was 39 when she did these travels... on her own, and very successfully. Her experience and contacts became crucial to the British government at the end of World War I in creating the countries of Syria and Iraq. So as you read this book, you understand a little more about the situation there today.

I have been reading about the Middle East preparatory to (hopefully) traveling to Jordan next year. One does not get far into the history of the region before the name Gertrude Bell comes up and I have read a biography of her and can now report that her own writing having to do with her travels in the area are everything that reviewers have reported. It was not surprising that I could not find an original edition of this book in a library so once again, Dover comes to the rescue, and this is a creditable reprint. I would be very curious what the original map of her travels looks like, and the pictures (of which she took and included many) reproduced a bit dark but are not too bad here. She writes with a certain understated flair and often leaves the reader (me anyway) wishing for more detail before she moves on to her next destination. But then, that is her gift and she is after all a travel writer, not a novelist. Her descriptions of people she encounters as well as of the encounter itself are told in vivid prose and I find it interesting (instructive?) that her verbage at no time causes any confusion as to the place and time from which she speaks. I am not done reading this book yet and I foresee reading it again, probably on an airplane.

I got this book after reading a bio of Gertrude Bell. I wanted to read something in her own words and was surprised by its readability.

Fine

I wanted to love it, but got bogged down in the writing style. It's very vintage, and good enough material in there. The three stars is more of a reflection of my short attention span than the quality of the book, I guess.