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Desert Places | 
 enlarge | Author: Robyn Davidson
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
Buy Used: $0.01
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Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 398404
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 10.9 x 8.4 x 0.2
ISBN: 0670840777
Dewey Decimal Number: 954.4
EAN: 9780670840779
ASIN: 0670840777
Publication Date: November 1, 1996
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
As Robyn Davidson writes in Desert Places, the Thar, a 230,000-square-mile expanse of formidably dry country in northwestern India, is a harsh land of "granite outcroppings, naked but for a few gullies of monsoon forest or a single, white-painted elephant stationed on a summit eternally surveying the farmlands below." Among the people who populate the Thar are the Rabari, who are quickly becoming modernized and dispossessed, wanderers on the fringes of urban civilization, people who are at home nowhere. After making a false start as a book of adventure travel, Desert Places becomes a work of cultural ecology and of amateur anthropology, reporting on the final days of a traditional nomadic culture once utterly at home in an inhospitable land.
Product Description
The author of Tracks provides a fascinating account of a year spent in northwest India with a wandering tribe called the Rabari, whose traditional migratory route has largely disappeared because of new political boundaries, atomic test sites, and irrigation. 25,000 first printing.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Desert Places August 16, 2008
`Desert Places` (1996) is Australian adventurer Robyn Davidson's second major travel book, her first being the better known Tracks (1980). She repeats a camel journey through the desert, but this time in Western India in the company of a nomadic people known as the Rabari. As usual, Davidison is full of lovable contradictions, sweet one moment and ready to kill en masse the next. Likewise her approach to the book takes a consciously anti-travel literature track, just about everything we associate with travel literature Davidson turns the tables. Or, at least she tries, but in the end it is still fundamentally part of the genre. For most readers, who are not conversant with the recent scholarly debates about travel literature (in relation to post-colonialism, post-modernism), the overall effect may be a little off-putting, with one New York Times critic interpreting Davidson's irreverence as "bad faith" (see NYT, "Chasing After Nomads", February 16, 1997, online). In the end I think Davidson succeeded in writing a good travel narrative, updated with politically correct concerns about the fate of traditional nomadic people under the homogenizing assault of globalization - but her overall attempt at breaking out of the genre into something 'greater' probably did not succeed. Still it is a fascinating look into what life is like for the Rabari, stripped of romanticism and from the perspective of women, and that makes it an important, unique and worthwhile journey.
 gripping and inspiring October 5, 2004
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I could not put this book down. Very thought provoking. An excellent read. A remarkable woman.
ex-pat review August 31, 2002
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I spent 2 years in India in the late 90s and this book began making its' way around the ex-pat crowd in the middle of my stay there. The word of mouth reviews were universally positive. While most of us didn't go through the extreme day to day challenges Ms. Davidson put herself through, we went through enough to completely empathize with her plights. Her eloquent descriptions of the often unending and unyielding discomforts imposed by India while, at the same time, it also offered the visitor delights and experiences you can't find anywhere else was simply spot-on. I recommend this book to anyone who truly enjoys travels and the self-reflection afforded through trips that take them out of their comfort zones.
ONE TERRIFIC READ--A REAL PAGE TURNER July 13, 2000
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
'Nuff said. Ms. Davidson is a terrific adventurer and an astonishingly good writer.
LIVING BY THE MYTH July 10, 2000
THIS BOOK IS A SPELLBINDING ACCOUNT OF THE ADVETURES OF ROBYN OF HER THAR DESERT SOJOURN. HER OBSERVATIONS ARE CHARACTERISED BY AN AMAZING CANDOUR AND DEPTH. SHE HAS ALSO EXPLORED DEEPLY THE PSYCHE OF THE PEOPLE OF THAR WHO ARE LIVING BY THE MYTH OF BEING CREATED BY SHIVA. THERE ARE STORIES ALSO TO THE ORIGINATION OF THIS NOMADIC RABARI TRIBE.
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