Full name: Baghdad Sketches: Journeys through Iraq

Author: Freya Stark Year: 1932 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Travel, Non Fiction, History Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Goodreads LibraryThing ISBNs: 9781848856554 1848856555

Freya Stark first journeyed to Iraq in 1927. Seven years after the establishment of the British Mandate, the modern state was in its infancy and worlds apart from the country it has since become. During her many years in Iraq, Stark was witness to the rise and fall of the British involvement in the country as well as the early years of independence. Typically--and controversially--she chose to live outside the close-knit western expatriate scene and immersed herself in the way of life of ordinary Iraqis--living in the "native" quarter of the city and spending time with its tribal sheikhs and leaders. Venturing out of Baghdad, she traveled to Mosul, Nineveh, Tikrit and Najaf, where she perceptively describes the millennia-old tensions between Sunni and Shi'a. In the 1940s she returned again, this time traveling south, to the Marsh Arabs, whose way of life has now all but disappeared; north into Kurdistan and later, Kuwait, in the days before the oil boom. Similar books: The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger Perseus in The Wind by Freya Stark Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia by Tony Horwitz In Europe by Geert Mak Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane Cities of Gold by Douglas Preston South with Endurance by Frank Hurley The Fourth Part of the World by Toby Lester Amsterdam by Russell Shorto A Traveller in Rome by H. V. Morton Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis Going Back to Bisbee by Richard Shelton Looking for the Lost by Alan Booth Goodnight, Mister Lenin by Tiziano Terzani Korea by Daniel Tudor The Big Roads by Earl Swift The Road from the Past by Ina Caro Landfalls by Tim Mackintosh-Smith South from Granada by Gerald Brenan