Description
By (author) Scheele, Judith
Short /annotation:
This is the story of the Sahara as you”ve never seen it before
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This is the story of the Sahara as you”ve never seen it before”Captivating and indispensable” Max Samson, author of Invisible Lines”A fascinating and intimate perspective of the region from the ground-up”Barnaby Rogerson, author of In Search of Ancient North AfricaBlue-veiled nomads, camels crossing infinite dunes, oases shimmering on the horizon: ready-made images of the Sahara are easy to conjure. But they can never truly capture a region that crosses eleven countries and is home to millions.This sweeping account upends old fantasies, revealing the far more interesting reality of the Earth”s largest hot desert. Drawing on decades of research, and years spent living in the region, anthropologist Judith Scheele takes us from Libya to Mali, Algeria to Chad, from the ancient Roman Empire to contemporary regional battles and fraught international diplomacy, questioning every easy cliché and exposing fascinating truths along the way. From the geology of the region, to the life it shelters, to the religions, languages and cultural andpolitical forces that shape and fracture it, this is a landmark work that tells the compelling story of a place that sits at the heart of our world, and whose future holds implications for us all.
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A captivating and indispensable work: Scheele clears the dust from our eyes to reveal the intricacies of a region few of us know nearly as well as we might believe.
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A gritty, deeply engaged, history of the fusion of peoples whose homeland is the Sahara. This is a fascinating and intimate perspective of the region from the ground-up: complete with plastic sandals, smugglers, migrants, border boom towns upheld by the Sahara”s enduring love affair with both camel and truck
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A stunningly original and deeply empathetic guided tour of the world”s greatest desert … This is far and away the best book on a distant place that might represent our near future
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In this excellent book, the Sahara is given a present and a past as seen from the inside …Read her beautifully written and compelling account, ready for every preconception you might have held about its subject matter to be overturned
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Praise for Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: ”An irresistible read … something particular and intensely human”
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An academic page-turner … brilliantly written and thrilling to read
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A must-read for anyone interested in the region
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Scholarship is impressive, arguments convincing; this is the book many who know the Sahara will wish they had written
Biographical note:
Judith Scheele is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in France. She has carried out extensive field research in Algeria, Mali and Chad, and published highly acclaimed books and articles on Saharan societies past and present, including Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara.
Promotional headline:
This is the story of the Sahara as you”ve never seen it before
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