Desert Places | 
|  | | | Title: | Desert Places | | Author: | Robyn Davidson | | Publisher: | Viking Adult | | Type: | Book / Hardcover | | Publication Date: | 01 November, 1996 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0670840777 / 9780670840779 | | List Price: | $23.95 | | You Save: | $20.96 | | Amazon Price: | $2.99 (via Amazon marketplace seller) | | | |
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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).
Amazon.com
As Robyn Davidson writes in Desert Places, the Thar, a 230,000-square-mile expanse of formidably dry country in northwestern India, is a harsh land of "granite outcroppings, naked but for a few gullies of monsoon forest or a single, white-painted elephant stationed on a summit eternally surveying the farmlands below." Among the people who populate the Thar are the Rabari, who are quickly becoming modernized and dispossessed, wanderers on the fringes of urban civilization, people who are at home nowhere. After making a false start as a book of adventure travel, Desert Places becomes a work of cultural ecology and of amateur anthropology, reporting on the final days of a traditional nomadic culture once utterly at home in an inhospitable land.
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Customer Reviews:
• Living By The Myth 10 July, 2000
THIS BOOK IS A SPELLBINDING ACCOUNT OF THE ADVETURES OF ROBYN OF HER THAR DESERT SOJOURN. HER OBSERVATIONS ARE CHARACTERISED BY AN AMAZING CANDOUR AND DEPTH. SHE HAS ALSO EXPLORED DEEPLY THE PSYCHE OF THE PEOPLE OF THAR WHO ARE LIVING BY THE MYTH OF BEING CREATED BY SHIVA. THERE ARE STORIES ALSO TO THE ORIGINATION OF THIS NOMADIC RABARI TRIBE.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3RDQZ30VYOTCA
• Desert Places 16 August, 2008
`Desert Places` (1996) is Australian adventurer Robyn Davidson's second major travel book, her first being the better known Tracks (1980). She repeats a camel journey through the desert, but this time in Western India in the company of a nomadic people known as the Rabari. As usual, Davidison is full of lovable contradictions, sweet one moment and ready to kill en masse the next. Likewise her approach to the book takes a consciously anti-travel literature track, just about everything we associate with travel literature Davidson turns the tables. Or, at least she tries, but in the end it is still fundamentally part of the genre. For most readers, who are not conversant with the recent scholarly debates about travel literature (in relation to post-colonialism, post-modernism), the overall effect may be a little off-putting, with one New York Times critic interpreting Davidson's irreverence as "bad faith" (see NYT, "Chasing After Nomads", February 16, 1997, online). In the end I think Davidson succeeded in writing a good travel narrative, updated with politically correct concerns about the fate of traditional nomadic people under the homogenizing assault of globalization - but her overall attempt at breaking out of the genre into something 'greater' probably did not succeed. Still it is a fascinating look into what life is like for the Rabari, stripped of romanticism and from the perspective of women, and that makes it an important, unique and worthwhile journey.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A963RX20PGRO8
• One Terrific Read--a Real Page Turner 13 July, 2000
'Nuff said. Ms. Davidson is a terrific adventurer and an astonishingly good writer.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A35RHRV7APS73I
• Ex-pat Review 31 August, 2002
I spent 2 years in India in the late 90s and this book began making its' way around the ex-pat crowd in the middle of my stay there. The word of mouth reviews were universally positive. While most of us didn't go through the extreme day to day challenges Ms. Davidson put herself through, we went through enough to completely empathize with her plights. Her eloquent descriptions of the often unending and unyielding discomforts imposed by India while, at the same time, it also offered the visitor delights and experiences you can't find anywhere else was simply spot-on. I recommend this book to anyone who truly enjoys travels and the self-reflection afforded through trips that take them out of their comfort zones.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AQ8ERSSJATDFF
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