The Life of My Choice

Rating:
Summary: A journey through lands and cultures long ago comprimised.
Review: It has been a few years since I read this book, so much of what I write has been pulled from my memory.

I heard an NPR review of "The Life of my Choice" and was moved to purchase the book. I was not disappointed. Thesiger takes you by the hand as he explores "The Dark Continent", from his childhood introduction to Halle Selassie to his life living among the nomadic people in the deserts of Northern Africa.

Adventures abound in this book. Written from the point of view of an old (and probably now dead!) British colonialist, it is a bit jaded at times. However, Thesiger truly appreciated the land and the people of Africa and found himself to prefer them to his refined contemporaries in England.

Rating:
Summary: A great choice
Review: It was his choice. No marriage. Just adventure. It couldn't be mine. Yet one can be envious. Grant him his choice, and it's a great story. Grant him also that he's added something valuable to our better understanding of some important parts of the world that aren't so often understood. This is not the first book he wrote. He's a unique and remarkable man and author, a writer who grabs your interest and whisks you through several hundred pages. Books don't get much better than this.

Rating:
Summary: An old man's memoir of a young man's freedom
Review: Thesiger's "Life" has the primary benefit of any well-written story by a not-quite-native person who was privileged to be accepted in a strange land -- it takes you someplace new and mysterious. On that basis, I found the book to be very good, an insider view of a place, culture, and terrain I'll never experience myself. As with so many wandering sons of the British Empire, such as T. E. Lawrence and Sir Richard Burton, you get a good feel for the place and time, albeit inevitably filtered through the author's personal prejudices and social values.

Thesiger is less a scholar than either Lawrence or Burton, and less able to stand back and place his experiences of Africa in historical, religious, and artistic contexts. Still, he was present at a time when colonialism was fading and new nations were being formed, living out the old Chinese curse/blessing, "may you live in interesting times." Anyone with an interest in Africa as it is in modern times can't help but be curious as to how things got the way they are, at least in the areas he was familiar with.

My only real quibble may be unfair. I'm no scholar of exploration writings, but none I've read that were written by men give particular insight into the lives of African women, certainly not to nearly the degree they do of African men. I realize Thesiger, like any male, would not have much access to the lives of women in cultures where women's existences were so restricted to hearth and home. Still, it's sad to only get half the story of this vanished past, especially since a handful of female explorers did manage to penetrate the life of the veil. Sadly, their books are much less read, although often better written. It must be said, though, that Thesiger in particular shows an astounding lack of interest in women in general, reserving all his descriptive powers and personal observations for the pageantry and color of warrior displays.

However, I did finish the book with a better understanding of fundamental differences between Arab north Africa and the rest of the continent. I recommend this book as worthwhile, but best read in context with others written both before Thesiger's time and since. Thesiger's views alone strike me as a little crotchety, a bit too much of an old man resenting how much the world has changed. It never seems to occur to him that the land he so enjoyed, and in which he was privileged to come and go as he pleased as a white sahib, had a cost to it's less fortunate inhabitants. The life he regrets losing is, in some ways, a better life for larger numbers of people than it was in his time.

Rating:
Summary: An old man's memoir of a young man's freedom
Review: Thesiger's "Life" has the primary benefit of any well-written story by a not-quite-native person who was privileged to be accepted in a strange land -- it takes you someplace new and mysterious. On that basis, I found the book to be very good, an insider view of a place, culture, and terrain I'll never experience myself. As with so many wandering sons of the British Empire, such as T. E. Lawrence and Sir Richard Burton, you get a good feel for the place and time, albeit inevitably filtered through the author's personal prejudices and social values.

Thesiger is less a scholar than either Lawrence or Burton, and less able to stand back and place his experiences of Africa in historical, religious, and artistic contexts. Still, he was present at a time when colonialism was fading and new nations were being formed, living out the old Chinese curse/blessing, "may you live in interesting times." Anyone with an interest in Africa as it is in modern times can't help but be curious as to how things got the way they are, at least in the areas he was familiar with.

My only real quibble may be unfair. I'm no scholar of exploration writings, but none I've read that were written by men give particular insight into the lives of African women, certainly not to nearly the degree they do of African men. I realize Thesiger, like any male, would not have much access to the lives of women in cultures where women's existences were so restricted to hearth and home. Still, it's sad to only get half the story of this vanished past, especially since a handful of female explorers did manage to penetrate the life of the veil. Sadly, their books are much less read, although often better written. It must be said, though, that Thesiger in particular shows an astounding lack of interest in women in general, reserving all his descriptive powers and personal observations for the pageantry and color of warrior displays.

However, I did finish the book with a better understanding of fundamental differences between Arab north Africa and the rest of the continent. I recommend this book as worthwhile, but best read in context with others written both before Thesiger's time and since. Thesiger's views alone strike me as a little crotchety, a bit too much of an old man resenting how much the world has changed. It never seems to occur to him that the land he so enjoyed, and in which he was privileged to come and go as he pleased as a white sahib, had a cost to it's less fortunate inhabitants. The life he regrets losing is, in some ways, a better life for larger numbers of people than it was in his time.

Rating:
Summary: A bold life and true
Review: This describes briefly his early years in Abyssinia (today Ethiopia and Eritria), followed even more briefly by his schooling in England, before it gets to the juicy stuff, in the form of his friendship with Haile Selassi, his explorations of the least well known corners of North Africa and Arabia, his service in the Sudan and in WW2 in the SAS. I think he's still alive, as I read an account of an interview of his a couple of years ago (1997 or so) and he was still going strong then. Until a few years ago was still living in Africa, where he had been living in a native village in Kenya for about 20 years. I would especially recommend this if you have read his 'Arabian Sands' or the 'Marsh Arabs', as it would give you a much more complete idea of who he actually was.