The Marsh Arabs
by Wilfred Thesiger | 
Perseus in The Wind
by Freya Stark | 
Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia
by Tony Horwitz | 
In Europe
by Geert Mak | 
Cities of Gold
by Douglas Preston |
South with Endurance
by Frank Hurley | 
Amsterdam
by Russell Shorto |
Looking for the Lost
by Alan Booth | 
Korea
by Daniel Tudor | 
Voices of the Old Sea
by Norman Lewis | 
The Road from the Past
by Ina Caro | 
A Voyage Long and Strange
by Tony Horwitz | 
Landfalls
by Tim Mackintosh-Smith |
Wild Coast
by John Gimlette | 
Meet Me in Atlantis
by Mark Adams | 
Travels with a Tangerine
by Tim Mackintosh-Smith | 
In the City of Bikes
by Pete Jordan | 
Walk the Lines
by Mark Mason | 
The Road to Ubar
by Nicholas Clapp | 
Cochineal Red
by Hugh Thomson |
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, 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 traveled to Mosul, Nineveh, Tikrit and Najaf, where she perceptively describes the millennia-old tensions between Sunni and Shi'a. In the 1940s she returned again, this time traveling 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.