Desert Places
1996
First Published
3.80
Average Rating
280
Number of Pages
* Robyn Davidson's previous book, Tracks, won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award In 1992 Robyn Davidson traveled through a year's migratory cycle with the Rabari, pastoral nomads of northwest India, whose grazing lands and trading and pilgrimage routes are quickly being destroyed by new political boundaries, atomic test sites, and irrigation. Sleeping among five thousand sheep and surviving on goat's milk, flatbread, and parasite-infested water in a landscape of misery and haunting loveliness, she endured exhaustion, malnutrition and disease. But she gained an understanding and the trust of a fiercely courageous people with a disappearing way of life. Displaying a writer's acute eye for detail and a traveler's keen appreciation for the beauty to be found in the earth's most desolate landscapes, Robyn Davidson explores with ruthless honesty her own desert places even as she immortalizes these keepers of the way and a culture about to die. Fans of Bruce Chatwin, Peter Mathiessen, and Mary Morris will find themselves enthralled by the passion and beauty of this account by a woman traveler who may be one of the great adventurers of our time (The Boston Globe).
Avg Rating
3.80
Number of Ratings
388
5 STARS
26%
4 STARS
41%
3 STARS
23%
2 STARS
7%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads
Author
Robyn Davidson
Author · 6 books
Robyn Davidson was born on a cattle property in Queensland, Australia. She went to Sydney in the late sixties, then spent time studying in Brisbane before moving to Alice Springs, where the events of this book begin. Since then, she has traveled extensively, living in London, New York, and India. In the early 1990s, she migrated with and wrote about nomads in northwestern India. She is now based in Melbourne, but spends several months a year in the Indian Himalayas.
