Return to the Marshes
Life with the Marsh Arabs of Iraq
Published on 20. October 2011
200 pages
978-0-571-28097-1 (ISBN)
Description
It was the legendary traveller Wilfred Thesiger who first introduced Gavin Young to the Marshes of Iraq. Since then Young has been entranced by both the beauty of the Marshes and by the Marsh Arabs who inhabit them, a people whose lifestyle is almost unchanged from that of their predecessors, the Ancient Sumerians.
On his return to the Marshes some years later Gavin Young found that the twentieth-century had rudely intruded on this lifestyle and that war was threatening to make the Marsh Arabs existence extinct. Return to the Marshes, first published in 1977, is at once a moving tribute to a unique way of life as well as a love story to a place and its people.
'A superbly written essay which combines warmth of personal tone, a good deal of easy historical scholarship and a talent for vivid description rarely found outside good fiction.' Jonathan Raban, Sunday Times
On his return to the Marshes some years later Gavin Young found that the twentieth-century had rudely intruded on this lifestyle and that war was threatening to make the Marsh Arabs existence extinct. Return to the Marshes, first published in 1977, is at once a moving tribute to a unique way of life as well as a love story to a place and its people.
'A superbly written essay which combines warmth of personal tone, a good deal of easy historical scholarship and a talent for vivid description rarely found outside good fiction.' Jonathan Raban, Sunday Times
More details
Edition
Main
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
File size
2,51 MB
ISBN-13
978-0-571-28097-1 (9780571280971)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Gavin Young (1929-2001) was a journalist, writer, and briefly a member of MI6. As a journalist, he was most associated with the Observer, being in the words of Mark Frankland's obituary 'a star foreign correspondent'. When disenchantment with journalism set in he turned to the writing of books. The two most famous ones are Slow Boats to China and its sequel Slow Boats Home. He himself had a particular affection for two later books In Search of Conrad (winner of the Thomas Cook Book Award) and A Wavering Grace. These and Beyond Lion Rock, From Sea to Shining Sea, Return to the Marshes and Worlds Apart are all being reissued in Faber Finds.
