Download or read book Freya Stark in Southern Arabia written by Malise Ruthven and published by Ithaca Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1934 Freya Stark, encouraged by her recent awards from the Royal Geographical and Royal Central Asian Societies, set out to explore the Incense Road in Arabia. The magnificent canyons of Wadi Hadhramaut, stretching for 350 miles inland from the coast, inspired Dame Freya to produce some of her best photographs. The fortified cities with their mud-brick skyscrapers and luscious palm groves perched along the valley beneath towering cliffs are amongst the most visually stunning sights in the world. This once-rich region, home to the Queen of Sheba and made prosperous as a trading route between India and Europe, was by then part of the Aden Protectorate under British rule, but very little of the country had been explored by Westerners. Dame Freya's particular empathy with local people, speaking their own language, resulted in charming pictures of people she worked or travelled with, and the homes and costumes of the period. She travelled in the country twice during the 1930s, and both times was forced to leave due to illness. However, her pictures of Aden, Mukalla and Shibam are exceptional in evoking traditional life in this fertile region of Arabia. During the second world war she returned to Aden and was sent by the Ministry of Information to counter Italian influence in the neighbouring Kingdom of Yemen. Armed only with her charm and a primitive cinema projector, she helped persuade the legendary Imam Yahya to keep his country out of war. Forty years later, at the age of 83, she returned to North Yemen, revisiting some of the places she remembered most fondly.
Download or read book The Southern Gates Of Arabia A Journey In The Hadbramaut written by Freya Stark and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Download or read book Freya Stark in Southern Arabia written by Freya Stark and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Winter in Arabia written by Freya Stark and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renowned explorer recounts her expedition to find a lost Arabian city in this “treasure of rare distinction among travel books” (The New York Times Book Review). One of the most unconventional and courageous explorers of her time, Freya Stark chronicled her extraordinary Travels in the Near East, establishing herself as a Twentieth Century heroine. A Winter in Arabia recounts her 1937–8 expedition in what is now Yemen, a journey which helped secure her reputation not only as a great travel writer, but also as a first-rate geographer, historian, and archaeologist. There, in the land whose “nakedness is clothed in shreds of departed splendor,” she and two companions spent a winter in search of an ancient South Arabian city. Offering rare glimpses of life behind the veil—the subtleties of business and social conduct, the elaborate beauty rituals of the women, and the bitter animosities between rival tribes—Freya Stark conveys the “perpetual charm of Arabia . . . that the traveler finds his own level there simply as a human being.”
Download or read book Freya Stark in Iraq and Kuwait written by Freya Stark and published by Ithaca Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1930s, Freya Stark held her only journalist's job, as a sub-editor on the Baghdad Times, where she published her first book, Baghdad Sketches. Her photographs of the Yazidis are unique, and her travels in Kurdistan now seem particularly poignant. In Kuwait she photographed pearl fishers, the Marsh Arabs and various residents of the capital city.
Download or read book Baghdad Sketches written by Freya Stark and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the fall of 1928, thirty-five year-old Freya Stark set out on her first journey to the Middle East. She spent most of the next four years in Iraq and Persia, visiting ancient and medieval sites, and traveling alone through some of the wilder corners of the region.
Download or read book The Minaret of Djam written by Freya Stark and published by Tauris Parke Paperbacks. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freya Stark traveled the difficult and often dangerous journey from Kabul to Kandahar and Herat in search of one of Afghanistan’s most celebrated treasures, the Minaret of Djam. This magnificent symbol of the powerful Ghorid Empire that once stretched from Iran to India lies in the heart of central Afghanistan’s wild Ghor Province. Surrounded by over 6,000 foot high mountains and by the remains of what many believe to have been the lost city of Turquoise Mountain—one of the greatest cities of the Middle Ages—Djam is, even today, one of the most inaccessible and remote places in Afghanistan. When Freya Stark traveled there, few people in the world had ever laid eyes on it or managed to reach the desolate valley in which it lies.
Download or read book Letters from Syria written by Freya Stark and published by Franklin Classics Trade Press. This book was released on 2018-11-10 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Passionate Nomad written by Jane Fletcher Geniesse and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2010-07-21 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book • Finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction “Highly readable biography . . . The woman who emerges from these pages is a complex figure—heroic, driven . . . and entirely human.”—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times Passionate Nomad captures the momentous life and times of Freya Stark with precision, compassion, and marvelous detail. Hailed by The Times of London as “the last of the Romantic Travellers” upon her death in 1993, Freya Stark combined unflappable bravery, formidable charm, fearsome intellect, and ferocious ambition to become the twentieth century’s best-known woman traveler. Digging beneath the mythology, Geniesse uncovers a complex, controversial, and quixotic woman whose indomitable spirit was forged by contradictions: a child of privilege, Stark grew up in near poverty; yearning for formal education, she was largely self-taught; longing for love, she consistently focused on the wrong men. Despite these hardships, Stark’s astonishing career spanned more than sixty years, during which she produced twenty-two books that sealed her reputation as a consummate woman of letters. This edition includes a new Epilogue by the author that, citing newly discovered evidence, calls into question the circumstances of Stark’s birth and adds new insight into this adventurous and lively personality. Praise for Passionate Nomad “Passionate Nomad is a work of nonfiction that reads and sings with the drama and lilt of a fine novel. The story of Freya Stark is stunning, inspiring, sad, funny, unique, and moving. Jane Fletcher Geniesse tells it straight, but with a care for delicious detail and a sympathy for the characters that make this a truly special book.”—Jim Lehrer “Passionate Nomad supplies a fascinating individual thread in the tapestry of twentiethcentury Middle Eastern history. . . . [Geniesse] has achieved, in the end, an admirable focus, at once critical and sympathetic. . . . For all Stark’s unresolved contradictions, . . . her distinction as a latter-day woman of letters survives.”—The New York Times Book Review “Compulsively readable . . . [Geniesse] has done a thorough job re-creating the life of a woman many consider to be the last of the great romantic travelers.”—The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
Download or read book The Zodiac Arch written by Freya Stark and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With such tantalizing chapters as "In Defence of Smuggling" and "Lunch with Homer," this is a witty, eye-opening tapestry of Freya Stark's writings on travel and a life spent as one of the twentieth century's most formidable adventurers. In chronological order, spanning an extraordinary 50 years from 1919 to 1967, Stark muses on the nature of travel and of being a woman—both writer and explorer—in what was then predominantly a male world. She also shares jewel-bright stories from across the world—Arabia to North Africa, Iran and India—that captivate the reader with every sentence. There are romantic picnics under starlit skies on remote islands, meaningful moments of quiet in Mecca and Jerusalem and heartfelt accounts of encounters with a kaleidoscope of people. The Zodiac Arch resurrects lost worlds, reveals a little of the woman behind the legend and is, at heart, a magnetic read for all those under the spell of wanderlust.
Download or read book Rome on the Euphrates written by Freya Stark and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished historical work presenting eight centuries of Roman history in Asia Minor and the Middle East. -- Front cover.
Download or read book The Valleys of the Assassins written by Freya Stark and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2001-07-24 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as a classic upon its first publication in 1934, The Valleys of the Assassins firmly established Freya Stark as one of her generation's most intrepid explorers. The book chronicles her travels into Luristan, the mountainous terrain nestled between Iraq and present-day Iran, often with only a single guide and on a shoestring budget. Stark writes engagingly of the nomadic peoples who inhabit the region's valleys and brings to life the stories of the ancient kingdoms of the Middle East, including that of the Lords of Alamut, a band of hashish-eating terrorists whose stronghold in the Elburz Mountains Stark was the first to document for the Royal Geographical Society. Her account is at once a highly readable travel narrative and a richly drawn, sympathetic portrait of a people told from their own compelling point of view. This edition includes a new Introduction by Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Stark's biographer.
Download or read book The Lycian Shore written by Freya Stark and published by Hassell Street Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Baghdad Sketches written by Freya Stark and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-30 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freya Stark first journeyed to Iraq in 1927. Seven years after the establishment of the British Mandate, the modern state was in its infancy and worlds apart from the country it has since become. During her many years in Iraq, Freya Stark was witness to the rise and fall of the British involvement in the country as well as the early years of independence. Typically - and controversially - she chose to live outside the close-knit western expatriate scene and immersed herself in the way of life of ordinary Iraqis - living in the 'native' quarter of the city and spending time with its tribal sheikhs and leaders. Venturing out of Baghdad, she travelled to Mosul, Nineveh, Tikrit and Najaf, where she perceptively describes the millennia-old tensions between Sunni and Shi'a, time not having dissipated their hatred. In the 1940s she returned again, this time travelling south, to the Marsh Arabs, whose way of life has now all but disappeared; north into Kurdistan and later, Kuwait, in the days before the oil boom. Painting a portrait of both the political and social preoccupations of the day as exquisitely as she does the people and landscapes of Iraq, Baghdad Sketches is a remarkable portrait of the country as it once was.
Download or read book Perseus in the Wind written by Freya Stark and published by Tauris Parke. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written just after the Second World War, Perseus in the Wind (named after the constellation) is perhaps the most personal, and haunting, of all Freya Stark's writings. She muses on the seasons, the effect light has on a landscape at a particular time of day, the smell of the earth after rain, Muslim saints, Indian temples, war and old age. Each chapter is devoted to a particular theme: happiness (simple pleasures, like her father's passion for the view from his cabin in Canada); education (to be able to command happiness, recognize beauty, value death, increase enjoyment); beauty (incongruous, flighty and elusive - a description of the stars, the burst of flowers in a park); death (a childhood awareness of the finality of time, the meaningfulness of the end); memory (the jewelled quality of literature, pleasure, love, an echo or a scent when aged by the passage of time). For those who have loved her travel writing, Perseus in the Wind illuminates the motivations behind her journeys and the woman behind the traveller.
Download or read book East is West written by Freya Stark and published by London, Murray. This book was released on 1945 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journalist, traveler, and writer Freya Stark wrote this book "as an armchair journey for the average reader" after discovering that contemporary knowledge of the Arab world in Europe and the United States was out of date. She gives an introductory history and political analysis of the region in the introduction, especially with respect to World War II, foreign presence in the region, and the region's future place in the world. This book, based on the author's travels, focuses particularly upon the Arabian Peninsula (specifically Aden in Yemen, where she was stationed by the British government as a diplomat), Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Stark does not attempt to keep the narrative falsely impersonal; her status as a foreign woman traveling by herself was wildly uncommon, and the way her informants responded to her reflects that fact.
Download or read book Misadventure in the Middle East written by Henry Hemming and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-11-26 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experience the tale of a hapless young artist, Yasmine the pick-up, and an extraordinary journey across the world.
