Rating: 
Summary: A Valuable Book To Read
Review: In this slender book Thesiger recounts several of his journeys though the Peninsula including the two crossings of the vast deserts of the Rub-al-Kahli. A fascinating tale, this book not only manages to skillfully capture our attention about a bleak and desolate region of the world, but it also brings our attention to the people who live in these lands. Inhabited by fierce, fanatical, and aggressive war-like tribes, the feat that Thesiger managed to achieve -- that of cris-crossing this bleak region -- is further accented by the fact the he was Christian traveling through a fundamentally lawless region ruled by a series of very suspicious and ruthless sheiks. Add to this that Thesiger was a Christian, and you can appreciate the great efforts he took to disguise himself and use elaborate cover stories. Thesiger spent many months travelling with the Bedu and over time became accepted as one of them among the tribes. Along with Marsh Arabs and the first part of his autobiography, My Life, My Choice, he paints what is best described as a human but often sterotypical picture of the Arab world. While he is quick to dismiss many of the myths associated with the Arabs, he still uses the harshness of the desert to keep impressing upon you the hardships and the bleakness of the terrain and how he still manages to survive it all despite terrible and grating thrist.
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Summary: Adventurers shrink the world
Review: It's a wonder of the human spirit that people can go through the things that true adventurers do and want to do them again. We are lucky that so many of them manage to write about their adventures so well, and Wilfred Thesiger is one of the best. It's inspiring in a world of such violence, nationalism, and tribal wars to read the stories of those who have travelled to utterly foreign places and found themselves to be at home.
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Summary: A classic!
Review: Nice, convenient Penguin edition, with, unusually for Penguin, quite good maps. I am taken by Thesiger's soul baring and his descriptions of all that relates to the Bedouin. The book is short, convenient to carry on a trip and an enjoyment to read.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful book
Review: Strange that such a book - which is basically a biographical resume of 4 years in the desert - can be that interesting. It is very difficult to put it aside once you have got into it, and it is sad when the story is finished. I actually bought the book in Abu Dabhi, after a few trips through the desert, and it was fascinating to read how people lived, what values they had, how the coped with an unbelievable tough environment in places where 40 years later highways and highrise buildings fill the landscape. A purchase - and a reading that you will not regret.
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Summary: Extraordinary Journeys in the "Empty Quarter" of Arabia
Review: The deserts of Arabia cover more than a million square miles. The southern desert occupies nearly half of the total area. It stretches nine hundred miles from the frontier of the Yemen to the foothills of Oman and five hundred miles from the southern coast of Arabia to the Persian Gulf. It is a wilderness of sand, a desert within a desert, an area so enormous and so desolate that even Arabs call it the "Empty Quarter."
Wilfred Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa in 1910 and educated at Eton and Oxford. Though British, he was repulsed by the softness and rigidity of Western life, "the machines, the calling cards, the meticulously aligned streets, etc." In the spirit of T.E. Lawrence, Thesiger spent five years exploring and wandering the deserts of Arabia. With vivid descriptions and colorful anecdotes he narrates his stories, including two crossings of the Empty Quarter, among peoples who had never seen a European and considered it their duty to kill Christian infidels.Thesiger greatly illuminates our understanding of the nomadic bedouins of Arabia. He loved, admired, respected and was humbled by a people who lived desparately hard lives in the harshest conditions with only a few possessions that might include saddles, ropes, bowls, goatskins, rifles and daggers and traveled days without food and water. Yet these people were unflappably cheerful, welcoming, generous, self-reliant, loyal and dignified. Thesiger explains why the Bedu with whom he traveled refused to forecast the weather (blasphemy against God)or could discern where to find a hare in the sand (only one set of tracks into the buried hole). As a reader I could almost sense I was traveling with Thesiger, could not help but mourn the passing of the way of life he described, and, as he, pondered the meaning of the word "civilized" as we Westerners conceive the term.
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Summary: Time travel at its best
Review: The exotic Near- and Middle-Eastern lands of the Levant and Arabia Felix were as unknown as possible for the average British or American citizen. But Thesiger was born to the expatriate breed. Familiar with the culture and fluent in the language, he was prepared to undergo any hardship to traverse the forbidding "empty Quarter" -- the vast desert in south Arabia. His narrative, travelling incognito and sharing the dangers and very simple pleasures with his guides, portrays a now-lost vista of dunes and camels from the REAL Arabian nights.
Rating: 
Summary: A Minor Masterpiece
Review: Thesiger stands in a long tradition of English who found the deserts of the Middle East hospitable. Wilberforce Clarke, Burton, Doughty, Lawrence, Glubb, Philby (Senior) - the list sometimes seems endless. One is tempted to speculate that the Arab world brings out certain facets of the English character, and perhaps it is true. "Arabian Sands" is one of the best travel books ever written. The purported idea behind the book was a chronicle of crossing Al Rub' al Khali - The "Empty Quarter" of the Eastern Arabian peninsula, one of the most barren areas on earth. This central focus of the expedition, and the story, gradually pales as one reads on and the reader becomes caught up in Thesiger's relationship with his Bedouin companions. The Bedouin are admittedly a fringe society in the Middle East. However, the values that their way of life represent have always been seen as having a central place in the Arab view of life, and Thesiger's obvious sympathy for his companions allows us to understand them as humans as few other western books can do. In this sense he resembles T.E. Lawrence, although he manages to tell his story in a lot less words than Lawrence did. This book will stand the test of time as one of the best books in the English language on the Arabs, and it is a rewarding read.
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Summary: Interesting and readable account of a lost world
Review: Thesiger's background and his detestation of the modern world (just after the end of the Second World War) made him uniquely suited to live and travel with the Bedu. It is astonishing that so few Westerners should have traveled to some of the places that Thesiger visited, until one reads of the difficulties that he had to overcome. I found his book to be a thoroughly enjoyable description of a fascinating people and an intruiging part of the world.
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Summary: a fascinating journey
Review: What an interesting book! I even dreamt about it. Before this book I had never imagined feeling compelled to visit a desert! Now my only regret is that the World that Thesiger describes has vanished!
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Summary: The Last of the Barefoot Explorers
Review: When I was a kid I dreamt of being an explorer. Never mind that I had never been out of New England and had no possibility of doing so. Discovering new lands and peoples seemed such a great job. What I couldn't figure out was how you got BE an explorer ? What, did you take a course someplace ? Once, in talking of other things, my father happened to remark that there must have been parts of the Maine woods where nobody had ever set foot (I don't think he was considering the Indians). Yes, I thought, first I would explore Maine and then, maybe some other, more distant lands. As I grew older, I realized the awful truth. Unless you wanted to freeze in Antarctica, dangle from icy rocks on a few mountains, or chop your way through insect-ridden, steamy jungles, there were no places left to explore. I was a slide rule in a computer age. Ah, well..... Wilfred Thesiger was born in more fortunate circumstances for an exploring life. His father was not a small businessman in New England, but the British ambassador to Ethiopia in the days when all parts of that country had not been visited by Westerners. The first part of ARABIAN SANDS describes the author's adventures travelling in wilder parts of Ethiopia. After Middle Eastern service in Sudan and elsewhere during WW II, Thesiger signed on as a locust hunter in the Arabian Peninsula, trying to locate the then unknown breeding grounds for the dreaded insect. He did it purely to be able to travel through the most unknown parts of the region, the Rub al-Khali or "the Sands"; Oman, the Hadhramaut, and the southern reaches of Saudi Arabia. He travelled with small groups of Bedu (Bedouin) on camelback, always barefoot and dressed in Arab clothing. He faced thirst, hunger, cold, the risk of serious accident, arrest by Saudi and Omani authorities, and death at the hands of raiding tribesmen. With no available maps, Thesiger relied completely on the guiding skills of various Bedu whom he hired. He had no radio, no global positioning whatevers, and no chance of a helicopter rescue. ARABIAN SANDS tells the story of Thesiger's travels in the Arabian deserts in the years 1945-1950, before Big Oil changed the lives of everybody there. An interesting pair of books to read to get an idea of the old world and how it changed would be this one plus Abdelrahman Munif's novel "Cities of Salt". Thesiger hated modernization and cities and would have preferred that the Bedu remain in their poverty, but in a state of desert purity. I feel that he romanticized the Bedu and the desert environment to an extreme because of his own character. Nevertheless his descriptions of Bedu life, their culture, and behavior are fascinating, as are many of the events that took place over the course of his long travels. If you are at all interested in that part of the world or in adventurous travels before the world became entrapped in visas and metal detectors, you must read this one !
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