Volume 3, Number 7 · November 19, 1964
Arabian Days
By R.W. Flint
The Marsh Arabs
by Wilfred Thesiger
Dutton, 242 pp., $6.50
Do we need another poetic appreciation of the Arabs by an eccentric Englishman when the French Canadians are crying for justice, when Rhodesia and South Africa are what they are? The answer, I think, is that we do. Wilfred Thesiger's extreme eccentricity more or less prevents him from writing a great book. Even V. S. Pritchett, in his admiring review in the New Statesman, admits that 'the final virtue of this book is its feeling for landscape.' But Thesiger's moral vision is at least as strong as his esthetic vision, his sympathies are warm and precise, and his energy impressive. This is still another of those absorbing records of panoramic action whose centers must be reconstructed by imagination and their relevance by analogy. But it has considerably more than more charm for anyone who can forgo the brilliancies of the Lawrences, T. E. and D. H., in return for qualities closer to those of a first-rate anthropologist, lesser than Lévi-Strauss, but better than most.
Review, 1343 words
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