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This book was very difficult to read as an audiobook. I advise against choosing the audiobook format. I have no complaints with the narration by Laurence Kennedy; he speaks clearly and at a perfect speed. The printed book contains maps, but they are NOT included in the PDF file that accompanied the audiobook. The PDF contains one short introductory paragraph followed by a list of the book's chapter titles and the first few words of each audiobook chapter. The PDF file has little value.

I had huge difficulty with the names of places, tribes and individuals. I do not know Arabic; names became a total blur to me. Flora and fauna are not in Latin; Arabic names are used here too. This being the situation and having no maps, I had to downscale my ambitions. What remained was to learn about the author's life before his travels of 1945-1950 and to learn about the nomadic Bedu people, their culture, their way of life and their moral codes and values. It was Bedu tribesmen that were Thesiger’s guides in the deserts he traversed in Rub Al Khali of southern Saudi Arabia, in Yemen and in Oman. Even as he concluded his travels, oil companies and politics were in the process of changing everything. He knew when he left he would not return. He had become too well-known. He was a foreigner, a Christian, and thus in the eyes of many powerful Arabian sheiks a despised infidel. He was no longer welcome.

There are a couple of chapters about Wilfred Thesiger’s youth and how he came to want to traverse the Arabian sands. We learn of his birth in 1910 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Abyssinia), his schooling at Oxford and how in 1930 he returned to Ethiopia having been personally invited to Emperor Haile Selassie’s coronation. During the Second World War he was stationed first in the Sudan and then in Syria. We come to see his love of the hard life and rigors of the desert. When he is offered the job of looking for locust breeding grounds in southern Arabia, he grabs it.

Then follows the real point of the book—Thesiger’s two desert crossings of Rub al Khali, also referred to as the Empty Quarter, his travels in Yemen and in inner Oman. Here we get to experience life in the desert and learn about the Bedu people and other Arab tribesmen.

We are told how Thesiger views them. Very few other Europeans have gotten to know them as intimately as he has. He feels an affinity for them, and as such forgives what others criticize. He sees in them uncompromising strength, valor and dedication to friends. He speaks of their humor, generosity courage, dignity and patience. He praises their powers of observation, their skill in handling men and their force of personality. HE says they do not steal; I thought this was stretching the truth, given the number of times camels were stolen. He understands their love of the desert and the freedom it offers. He sees the beauty of the desert, saying “the world was very still as staring into a bowl of silence.� In the desert Thesiger found inner peace. He understood why the Bedu chose to live there. He speaks also of barbaric rites as the flaying of the penis, about looting, beheadings, chopping off of hands, blood feuds and vengeful retaliations.

I did learn about the man, Wilfred Thesiger, about life in the deserts and about the Bedu, but I retain my right to make my own judgment of them.