mideast travel

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 194 pages. The Jordan Rift Valley, stretching from the Red Sea to Lebanon, was ripped open millions of years ago by vast forces within the earth. This geological object has also been a part of human history ever since early humans used it as a path in their journey out of Africa. And for a quarter of a century it has been part of the biography of Haim Watzman, an Israeli journalist. In the autumn of 2004, as his country was riven by a fierce debate over its borders, Watzman took a two-week journey up the valley. Along the way he met scientists who try to understand the rift through the evidence lying on its surface--an archaeologist who reconstructs the fallen altars of a long-forgotten people, a zoologist whose study of bird societies has produced a theory of why organisms cooperate, and a geologist who thinks that the valley will some day be an ocean. He encountered people whose life and work on the shores of the Dead Sea and Jordan River have led them to dream of paradise and to seek to build Gardens of Eden on earth--a booster for a chemical factory, the director of a tourist site, and an aging socialist farmer who curates a museum of idols. And he discovered that the geography's instability is mirrored in the volatility of the tales that people tell about the Sea of Galilee.

Softcover. London, Eland /Hippocrene Books, reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 172 pages. Having learned to appreciate Muslim life while living in Pakistan, Peter Mayne settled down to live in the back streets of Marrakesh in the 1950s. Rather than watch from the shelter of a hotel terrace, he rented rooms, learned the language, made friends, and became embroiled in conspiratorial picnics, hashish-laced dinners and in the enchantments and misunderstandings of the street, with its festivals, love affairs, potions and gossip. By turns used, abused and cherished by his neighbors, Mayne wrote their letters for them and captured the essence of their lives in this affectionate and hilarious account. A new edition of a 1953 classic that captures the very essence Marrakesh and its people. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, John Murray, 2nd pr., 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 254 pages, index, b&w illustrations, double-page map. Light beige cloth, gilt lettering on spine, top of spine with fraying, light spotting to front cover otherwise clean. An illuminating record of travel in the Aden Protectorate in 1939 on the eve of World War II by a Dutch scholar of the region and it's people.

Hardcover. London, Octagon Press, reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in dust jacket with fading to spine, 203 pages. Subtitled: "An Account of Travels in Asia and Africa, and Four Years Studying the Dervishes, Sufis and Fakirs, by Living Among Them." The author documents the largely ignored and forgotten ancient mystic organizations and their practices. Pages tanning otherwise a clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Travel Book Club, 1st, Book: Good, Hardcover, 233 pages, color frontispiece and 8 b&w plates by Mary Gordon West, endpapers map. Light shelfwear. No date but appears to be about 1940.

Hardcover. Boston, Roberts Brothers, 1st, 1895, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two volumes complete. 811 pages, many b&w illustrations. Green cloth with black rule, gilt design and lettering, top edge gilt. Volume one with fraying to cloth at top of spine, previous owner's sticker inside front covers. Otherwise clean, very good set.

Softcover. London, Sidgwick & Jackson , reprint, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 192 pages, b&w illustrations. An abridged version of the two volume, 1892 book of Curzon's travels on the following route: Ashkabad, Kuchan, Kelat-I-Nadiri, Meshed, Teheran, The Northern Provinces, Teheran, Ishfahan, Shiraz to Bushire. Clean copy, minor corner wear.

Hardcover. New York, Aperture, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 96 pages, color photographs, Like new in publisher's shrinkwrap. Doors of the Kingdom is a unique collection of photographs depicting the ancient and disappearing craft of doormaking in Arabia. The Islamic concept of hurma, or sanctity of a place of dwelling or worship, is recurrent throughout Arabic poetry and literature. The door (bab), preserver of sanctity, becomes symbolic of the boundary between public and private space, and between the profane and the sacred. In 1995, Haajar Gouverneur traveled throughout the Arabian Peninsula photographing each region's distinctive doorways and the remaining artisans who make them. The doors of Arabia, painstakingly hand-carved from the wood of the Al-Athel trees, last in their exquisite variety for hundreds of years. This ancient craft, passed down from generation to generation in the central and northern regions of Saudi Arabia, is now nearly extinct. Modern materials, technology, and changing priorities threaten the continuity of the sacred and artisanal tradition of doormaking.

Hardcover. Reading, Garnet, 1st UK, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 118 pages. Illustrated with black & white photographs by Freya Stark. 1/2" deep closed tear at top right corner of first 4 pages - appears to be publishers error. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Geo. H. Ellis, 1st, 1895, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with bright gilt lettering, all edges gilt, 209 pages, b&w illustrations. Previous owner's stamp on front endpapers. Bright original 1895 edition.

Hardcover. NY, Aperture, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 160 pages. Michael von Graffenried, an award-winning Swiss photographer, covertly photographed civil strife in Algeria from the early 1990s through 1998. In a land where Islamic terrorists have executed over sixty journalists and photographers in the last seven years, Graffenried's very survival is remarkable. His extraordinary accomplishment, however, is these photographs, which form a composite of Algeria that is more whole than the nation itself, fractured by one segment of the population in favor of democracy and another in favor of an Islamic state.Graffenried makes his pictures secretly, using an antique Widelux panoramic camera with a hidden lens. He would risk his picture and his life were he to raise a camera to his eyes. Instead, he shoots from the hip, with his hands clasped over what looks like a pair of binoculars. In learning to frame his photographs without a viewfinder, he opens himself to a rich array of surprise and irony in his pictures, and reveals a society that has been concealed from the international community for nearly seven years.

Hardcover. NY, Macmillan, 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. In 1483 Friar Felix Fabri, a Dominican brother from Ulm, Germany, left his priory on two occasions to visit the Holy Land. this account chronicles the homeward journey of the Friar's second trip. Miss Prescott draws from a detailed daily log the Friar kept and supplements his description of the pilgrimage with her own vivid and colorful observations. B&w illustrations, index. Small name on inside front cover, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Paris, Flammarion, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 202 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Pays homage to the ultimate travel dream of that era. This collection of over 100 autochrome, sepia, and black and white photographs captures delicate, lost details: the dusty, labyrinthine walls of the casbah; the dappled sunlight on the market stall of a souk; the intricate metal work of traditional jewelry. Each image is accompanied by an informative text that situates the photograph in its historical reality.

Hardcover. London, England, Karl Baedeker, 2nd Edition, REvised and Augmented, 1894, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 444 pages. Hardcover (flexible cloth). "With 17 Maps, 44 Plans, and a Panorama of Jerusalem". B/w and color illustrated maps, some fold out. Red fabric cover boards with gilt title on spine (faded) and front cover board. Banded design blind stamped on boards and spine. Fabric ribbon bookmark attached at top of spine. Age wear to covers (see images). Former library book with expected labels, marks, stamps and other identifying characteristics (see images). Decorated marbled edges. Front cover has bump to top right corner (see image). Charming, old, pocket-sized travel book that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about turn-of-the-century Palestine and Syria.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brown cloth boards and spine with bright gilt lettering on spine. Maps as endpapers. 333 pages, b&w illustrations. This book covers the first contacts between the United States and the Middle East from the earliest times (1800s) to the mid-nineteenth century. The author describes exotic people and places in the Middle East and how American interests there were far from marginal although centered around the American Protestant missionary activity during that period. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 390 pages, b&w illustrations. From the stony desolation of Jordan's desert, it is but a step through a doorway into the bath house of the Qusayr 'Amra hunting lodge. Inside, multicolored frescoes depict scenes from courtly life and the hunt, along with musicians, dancing girls, and naked bathing women. The traveler is transported to the luxurious and erotic world of a mid-eighth-century Muslim Arab prince. For scholars, though, Qusayr 'Amra, probably painted in the 730s or 740s, has proved a mirage, its concreteness dissolved by doubts about date, patron, and meaning. This is the first book-length contextualization of the mysterious monument through a compelling analysis of its iconography and of the literary sources for the Umayyad period. It illuminates not only the way of life of the early Muslim elite but also the long afterglow of late antique Syria. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Broadway Books, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 304 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Minor foxing to top edge of text block. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. A tight copy.

Softcover. Hanover NH, Brandeis University Press , reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wraps, 228 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on title page. The Dead Sea is unlike any other place on earth. Situated a quarter mile below sea level, so saline it can't support life, surrounded by a desolate landscape, it is not just a geologic feature but a source of mystery connected to religious faith. In elegant and vivid prose, Barbara Kreiger re-creates and analyzes the myths and legends surrounding the site and examines both its natural history and its gradual and difficult exploration. But The Dead Sea (first published as Living Waters in 1988) is more than a detailed and delightful travelogue. It is also an inquiry into the human and political drama that has swirled around this mysterious place for more than 12,000 years. In an afterword to the new edition, Kreiger shows how the sea in the post-Peace Accord era may come to take on a new symbolism: with perpetual need for water and a thriving mineral industry as common bonds, Israel and Jordan, two traditional antagonists whose border bisects the sea, may find themselves joining forces to preserve its fragile ecosystem against the threats of technology and tourism. Tan stain to top corner of text b;ock, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Louisville KY, Fons Vitae , Revised Ed., 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 197 pages. Some of the earliest, most rare, formative, and concise examples of Sufi methodology to appear in translation, these works examine the inherently defective nature of the soul, the roles it must assume, the path it must travel towards purification, and how to best manage that itinerary while avoiding the pitfalls and obstacles of the journey. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Washington DC, National Geographic Books, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 207 pages. Recounted in gripping words and unforgettable images, Avakian's remarkable experiences will draw readers into the Muslim world to meet friends and terrorists, leaders and thieves and everyday people. She lived and worked for two years in the Gaza strip, often in Islamic dress, once beaten bloody by Hamas. For several terrifying days in Somalia she was pinned down by sniper fire on the way to her hotel. She careened across the snowy Tien-Shen Mountains with Islamic fundamentalists in an ancient Lada, only to be detained and tossed out by the Uzbek KGB. All the while, she captured some of the most important stories of our time-the famine in Sudan, the violence in Gaza and Somalia, the daily life of Hezbollah. She traveled extensively with Yasser Arafat as one of the only non-Arab photographers given such access. Small scar to front of dust jacket otherwise a clean copy.