There were no pictures, and a some typos, but nothing too annoying. Note: The version of "Desert and Sown" is available as free Kindle download. Such books, in the age of Google, are really enhanced by quick searches to view the sights described. Some of the ruins Bell describes have been destroyed by ISIS. It's a different Syria than the current bloodstained version. Whether it be her travelling companions, meals, the landscape and weather, or the various ruins themselves, Bell's eye for detail and precise but also eloquent phrasing, capture the reader's imagination. The book is about Bell's 1905 journey from Jericho to Antioch, with lots of stops and ruin crawling along the way. In "The Desert and the Sown," Bell's voice does indeed emerge, and it's quite impressive. By going down that road of snippets, those too brief glimpses never really allowed for Bell's voice to truly emerge. The book was structured in such as show the many facets of Bell's personality. That title, I believe, was meant to accompany a recent Werner Herzog movie on Bell. I found this title after being put-off by a Penguin title, A Woman in Arabia: The Writings of the Queen of the Desert. I'm way late getting to any kind of review on this, so things have faded a bit, so I'll keep it short.
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