Yemen


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    • Author : Tim Mackintosh-Smith
    • Binding : Hardcover
    • Dewey Decimal Number : 953.3
    • EAN : 9781585670017
    • ISBN : 1585670014
    • Is Eligible For Trade In? : Yes
    • Label : Overlook Hardcover
    • List Price : $35.00 (USD)
    • Manufacturer : Overlook Hardcover
    • Number Of Items : 1
    • Number Of Pages : 280
    • Package Dimensions : 1.08 inches (Height) x 9.29 inches (Length) x 1.32 pounds (Weight) x 6.29 inches (Width)
    • Publication Date : 2000-03-20
    • Publisher : Overlook Hardcover
    • Studio : Overlook Hardcover

    Englishman Tim Mackintosh-Smith was studying Arabic at Oxford when he visited Yemen, a forgotten country at the heel of the Arabian peninsula, and became obsessed with the place and its language. He's lived there since 1982, and this book--marketed as travel writing but more a blend of personal memoir and national history--is the result. There are certainly travel episodes, such as a trip to the remote island of Susqatra where the Gulf of Aden meets the Indian Ocean. Yet Yemen is more the product of a man gone native than a visitor with an itinerary. Indeed, Mackintosh-Smith offers a forthright defense of the country's lotus-like drug culture, which centers on qat, a leaf that produces a narcotic effect when chewed. "We qat chewers, if we are to believe everything that is said about us, are at best profligates, at worst irretrievable sinners," he writes. Although international health officials have warned against the drug, Mackintosh-Smith assures us this is all "quasi-scientific poppycock." The leaf, he says, helps its users to "think, work, and study." Yemen is surely an exotic land, and one of its charms--fully revealed in Mackintosh-Smith's digressive prose--is the way it has remained quaintly Arabic and seemingly immune to the modern forces transforming its neighbors. Well-received upon its initial publication in the United Kingdom, Yemen may come to be recognized as a small classic. --John J. Miller

    - Amazon.com Review

    Yemen is arguably the most fascinating and least known country in the Arab world. Classical geography described it as a fabulous land where flying serpents guarded incense groves. Medieval Arab visitors told of disappearing islands and menstruating mountains. Our current ideas of this country at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula have been overrun by images of the desert, by oil, by the Gulf War-but there is another Arabia. Writing with an intimacy and a depth of knowledge gained through thirteen years among the Yemenis, Mackintosh-Smith is a traveling companion of the best sort-erudite, witty, and eccentric. Crossing mountain, desert, ocean, and three millennia of history, he reveals a land that, in the words of a contemporary poet, has become the dictionary of its people. In Yemen: The Unknown Arabia we witness the extraordinary in the ordinary. Yemen is a part of Arabia, but it is like no place on earth, and Yemen is a book in which every page is filled-like the land it describes-with the marvelous.

    - Product Description

    Customer Reviews:

    Rated 4.0 stars Customers rated Yemen 4.0 stars out of 5.0 based on 8 reviews:

    • Travels in Dictionary Land, if by another name

      by John L Murphy (Los Angeles) - 2008-03-19  Rated 4 stars
      Very much a British Arabist travelogue, and as Sir Charles Doughty, Sir Richard Burton, Wilfred Thesiger, Freya Stark, and T.E. Lawrence-- and perhaps less fervently so Jonathan Raban-- have demonstrated the past century-and-a-half, Mackintosh-Smith takes the trouble to enter the culture. He learns the language, and this account of what the British edition called "Travels in Dictionary Land" is what made me seek this book out. His explanation of the nuances and ambiguities of Arabic remains, five years at least since I read this, the most vivid characteristic of this narrative. His visit to the island of Socotra, by its natural contrasts with mainland Yemen, intrigued me. Here, perhaps freed from some of the constraints of the interior of the nation, it appeared to me that the author allowed himself a sense of adventure that parts of the dominant narrative, landlocked, did not spark in him. He does make you wonder, as with many earlier British Arabists, about his motives in separating himself from his native land. His reserve remains coy, although it appears that part of this may be--as with some of his predecessors-- that his sexuality may lead him into compromising or dangerous situations. This is hinted at more than discussed and adds a frisson to this somewhat antique mode of storytelling of a foreigner's long sojourns, his nearly three decades spent in such forbidding lands, trying to "pass." This and his sequel of sorts (also reviewed by me) "Travels with a Tangerine" which attempts to follow the medieval Ibn Batutta's route across Asia, are recommended with therefore slight reservation. The amount of disclosure on the part of those he meets balances with the author's own reticence. He deploys himself rigorously, and part of the charm and a bit of the frustration of his two books taken together is this stance that he assumes.

    • eh

      by PhoenixTree (Seattle) - 2006-03-04  Rated 3 stars
      I suppose I expected a bit more with this book, I mean, it was okay...the author provided a concise conveyance of the history and culture, but I have a hard time believing that the Yemenis are steeped in such ridiculous superstition (mostly because I'm of Yemenite descent myself.) I further was deeply annoyed by his generalist comments not only concerning the Yemeni people, but particularly the Hadramis; for me it bordered on rascist. I also which he spoke more about the people and customs of Socotra, and what the indigenous Socotri language sounded like as opposed to Arabic. But obviously the author loves his adopted homeland or he would've left it a long time ago.

    • Entertaining travelogue about Yemen

      by Utah Blaine (Somewhere on Trexalon in District 268) - 2006-02-27  Rated 4 stars
      This is a travelogue of a Brit's visit to and exploration of Yemen. The author paints a beautiful and romantic picture of Yemen with text that is both easy and enjoyable to read. I knew virtually nothing about Yemen before reading this book, and I purchased it from Amazon on a whim. I was not disappointed. Although there is some discussion of history and politics in this book, the author's primary emphasis is describing the scenery, the people, and the culture that he has experienced on his travels. If the author's goal was to convey a bit of the complexity of Yemeni culture, some of the natural beauty of the Yemeni landscape to a Western audience, and a part of the rich history of Yemen, he has succeeded. I found the author's description of a sailing trip to Suqutra, an island off the coast of Yemen, to be particularly evocative. The `ritual' of qat was also surprising and interesting. I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn about Yemen from a Westerner's viewpoint, particularly if one looking for an entertaining, not scholarly, account. Some of the less enthusiastic reviews of this book state that the account is too idealistic. This is probably a fair criticism, but I do not view this as a drawback in this type of book.

    • decent book at best

      by S. Graves - 2004-05-04  Rated 3 stars
      Apparently a reprinted version of Travels in Dictionary Land (if it was different i didn't notice) it gives a good historical and social look at Yemen but mostly in an overly exotic manner. The book and its many anecdotes, however, are very useful as a basis for further research. The chapter on traveling to Socotra is fascinating as well. At times, the reading seemed difficult to an American who is not accustomed to British humor or idioms, but rarely is the meaning lost. While this book is good for light reading or to get an idea of some of the historical, geographical and social aspects of Yemen, the idealistic vision of traditionalism grows tiring. If you're looking for serious commentary on what it is like to live and work as a foreigner in modern day Yemen, look elsewhere.

    • excellent travel book on a truly unknown part of Arabia

      by Tim F. Martin (Madison, AL United States) - 2004-01-14  Rated 5 stars
      Often times reviled throughout history as a backwater, often backward, author Tim Mackintosh-Smith does a wonderful job in showing Yemen as an intriguing land, an unknown section of Arabia, bringing to the reader some of the history, culture, people, and geography of this much neglected corner of the Middle East. Mackintosh-Smith provides an excellent primer of Yemni history. Yemen we find out once hosted powerful pre-Islamic civilizations, South Arabian states like Saba, Ma'in (whose massive and expertly produced stone works later overawed the Romans), Qaban, and Hadramawt, wealthy merchant kingdoms that grew rich on their tight control of aromatic gums - particularly frankincense and myrrh as well as cinnamon brought from India - in great demand among the Pharaonic Egyptians for medicine and for the process of mummification, by the Assyrians, by the Greeks, the Romans, the ancient kingdoms growing rich on spices rather than oil. Many of the lands were cultivated thanks to the Marib Dam - a massive structure that finally collapsed in the sixth century, that according to legend was destroyed by a rat with iron teeth - or to very impressive irrigation works, via stone tunnels cut into the living rocks of the mountains, some tunnels 150 yards long and big enough to drive a car through and still used to supply water to highland villages over 2000 years after they were built. With the collapse of this civilization - linked by many to the collapse of the Marib Dam - there was a Yemeni diaspora of sorts, as many Yemenis were in the vanguard of the early conquering armies of Islam, spreading throughout the Arab world as far as East Africa, Ethiopia, Iraq, Syria, Tunisia, and even Spain. Later on the Rasulid sultans ruled southern Yemen between the 13th and 15th centuries, making their capital of Ta'izz a wealthy and cosmopolitan capital, its rulers patrons of many of the sciences, producing astrolabes and magnetic compasses while the rest of the Islamic world was in ruins thanks to the Mongols. Modern Yemeni history is also well covered though I found it at times confusing. The author visited many areas of Yemen. He hiked down canyons and dry wadi (seasonally dry river beds), warned by the locals of the tahish, a cow-sized, hyena like Yemeni bogeyman, though more likely in danger of the sayl, a roaring chest-high wall of water that can suddenly fill canyons thanks to distant highland rains. He viewed many mountain villages and homes perched precariously over such wadi, its citizens living on centuries-old terraces carved into the mountain, designed to catch and slow the descent of every bit of precious water that rains upon the mountains. He sampled a great variety of Yemeni foods, such as saltah (stew based on vegetables and broth topped by hulbah, fenugreek flour whisked to a froth with water), rawbah (soured milk from which the fat has been removed to make butter, popular on the island of Suqutra), qishr (a drink made from the husks of coffee beans, the bean of which have long been a major Yemeni export), and baghiyyah honey, said to the finest in the world and produced only in Yemen by bees pasturing only on ilb trees. He encountered a few of the Jews of Yemen, only a few thousand of which are left, identified by their corkscrew curl side locks. He viewed a bara', an Islamic tribal festival still practiced in the mountains, looking like a dance but more akin to a medieval tournament, a place to display skill with weapons and with heavy connotations of honor and tribal solidarity. He wrote of the qabili - the mountain tribesmen - who are regarded by city dwellers as yokels but also regarded with pride as part of their ancestry, regarding them as honorable people, ones practicing great hospitality to strangers, with many symbolically becoming a tribesmen by adoption of the asib, the tribesman's upright dagger. He visited those who were sayyid, male descendents of the Prophet, often whom devote their lives to Qur'anic knowledge, forming a class that has long had a critical role in Yemeni politics and religion. He visited Aden, one of the greatest ports in the world, its "craggy profile" formed by volcanic activity, a weird city thanks to local topography, not "one city but a series of settlements separated by outriders of the central peak, Jabal Shamsan," many of those settlements quite distinct in character, a city once contested by the Ottomans, the French, and held by the British for the better part of two centuries. He visited two sub-cultures within Yemen that don't always Arabic; the Mahris, located east of Hud along al-Masilah, racially distinct and following the very un-Arabic matrilineal descent system, and the native peoples of Suqutra, who until relatively recently many did not speak Arabic at all but rather Suqutri. Indeed the Island of Suqutra, once called the Island of Dragon's Blood thanks to one of its most famous exports, a blood red resin from the dragon's blood tree (_Dracaena cinnabari_, actua ...

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