Africa & Middle East

Wilfred Thesiger's account of crossing the Empty Quarter of Arabia twice in the late 1940s with Bedouin companions. A farewell to a way of life that was already ending — the oil companies were arriving as Thesiger left. The prose is austere and the landscape is absolute.

Conrad's novella about a journey up the Congo River is the most influential short work of fiction in the English language. Marlow's search for Kurtz is a journey into the center of colonial violence, human capacity for evil, and a darkness that has nothing to do with Africa.

Thesiger in East Africa — the final years of a life spent among traditional peoples in landscapes the modern world was closing in on. Elegiac and uncompromising.

The scientific investigation behind The Serpent and the Rainbow — the ethnobotany of Haitian zombie powder, Vodou pharmacology, and the boundary between death and not-death. Academic but riveting.

The first novel — airmail pilots over the Sahara and the Spanish coast, written from the cockpit. Romantic, dangerous, and suffused with the light of North Africa. The apprentice work that led to Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars.

Thesiger's first expedition — crossing the Danakil desert of Ethiopia in the 1930s, through one of the most hostile landscapes on earth, among people who had killed every previous European expedition. He was twenty-three.

Thesiger's autobiography — the full sweep, from Ethiopia to the Empty Quarter to the marshes of Iraq. The definitive account of a life spent choosing difficulty over comfort, wilderness over civilization.

The popular account of the Haitian zombie investigation — Vodou, pharmacology, and a Harvard ethnobotanist in over his head. The book that made Wade Davis famous, and the one he's been trying to live down since.

Markham grew up in Kenya, trained racehorses, and became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. Hemingway said she could write rings around all of them. He was right.

The authorized biography — the full arc of a life spent choosing the hardest path. Maitland had access to Thesiger's papers and the result is definitive.

Frenchman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wasn’t just the writer of The Little Prince, he was a pilot who helped pioneer postal aviation in the 1920s, when planes barely had instruments (he lamented that pilots of later, more-advanced planes were little more than accountants). Wind, Sand is his masterpiece of memoir and ode to the romance of flying in its earliest days. Saint-Exupéry crashed many times, including in the Sahara (a gripping account), but the book flies highest when he rhapsodizes about the joys of the sky. “The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth,” he wrote, and in this case it has unveiled the true face of the man.