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Book Heaven / Hell: Eamonn Gearon We proudly present the first in a new series of articles, wherein we ask the all important questions: which book would you be happy to spend time with for eternity, and which would you find unbearably hellish to be stuck with? The very first heaven and hell is with Eamonn Gearon, author of The Sahara.
Book Heaven Whoever said a man (or woman) needs nothing else in this world besides a library and a garden was wise indeed. Being surrounded by books is my very idea of Heaven, so when it comes to naming names for my Book Heaven, the task is not an easy one. My whole life has been filled with countless delicious books, the thought of which makes me smile even now. It is wonderful to measure existence in periods of time and the volumes that have filled them. Mood and available time will always dictate what one reads, whether it is a couple of hours with Agatha Christie or a leisurely year or two in the company of Gibbon’s incomparable Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Alongside the above, Book Heaven would always have room for lots of travel and history, including Herodotus, Ibn Battuta, Eric Newby and Paddy Leigh Fermor. Evelyn Waugh, John le Carré, every single word from the pen of PG Wodehouse, plenty of poetry, both ancient and modern, and a proper, heavy, old-fashioned, hard-backed Encyclopaedia Britannica would also populate my Book Heaven.
Book Hell My reading tastes are extremely catholic, with time being the greatest limitation. The idea of “book” and “hell” appearing in the same sentence is something that never occurred to me until now. It is true that there are certain books I have never read, for example bodice-rippers a la Mills and Boon or Harlequin, which is not to say that I would never read one or more of them if I had nothing else to hand. For me, Book Hell would consist of nothing but books that one could not read. Book Hell would be tomes in foreign languages with which one was
For me, Book Hell would consist of nothing but books that one could not read. Book Hell would be tomes in foreign languages with which one was not familiar. Given enough time – and a dictionary – anything in one of the Romance languages would be acceptable. My Arabic is good enough to enjoy reading in that tongue, but a library of volumes in, say, Chinese or Japanese, languages completely beyond my ken, would be absolute Book Hell. ++++ Eamonn Gearon is an author, Arabist, historian and analyst who has lived for nearly 20 years in the Greater Middle East – from Kabul to Casablanca. A sometime camel-powered solo Saharan explorer, today Eamonn spends his time researching and writing books about the Middle East. He also regularly advises government officials, military chiefs and private business on both sides of the Atlantic and across the Middle East. ++++ The Sahara is the quintessence of isolation, epitomizing both remoteness and severity of environment unlike any other place on the face of the earth. Replete with myths and fictions, it is a wild land, dotted with oases and camel trains trudging through sand dunes that roll like the THE SAHARA waves on a sea, as far as the distant horizon. But this is just part of the picture. The largest desert in the world, the Sahara ranges from the river Nile running through Egypt and Sudan in Signal Books Ltd 2011, the east, to the Atlantic coast from Morocco to Mauritania in the west; stretching from the Atlas Paperback, 256 pages, £12.00 Mountains and the shores of the Mediterranean in the north, to the fluid Sahelian fringe that delineates the desert in the south. Invaders and traders have come and gone for millennia, but the Sahara is also the place that some people call home. While larger than the continental United States, this vast area contains only three million people: Africans and Arabs, Berber and Bedu, Tuareg and Tebu. Eamonn Gearon explores the history, culture, and terrain of a place whose name is familiar to all, but known to few. Conquered and Cursed from the 50,000-strong army of Cambyses, swallowed in a sandstorm in the sixth century BC, to the us marines first foreign engagement, in 1805; Hannibal and his elephants, Caesar against Anthony and Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, the armies of Islam, Napoleon, and Rommel versus Monty. Myths and Mysteries: from whales in the White desert to the arrival of camels in the Great Sand Sea; chariots of the gods and colonialists’ motor-cars; from the Land of the dead to Timbuktu; salt and gold mines, fields of oil and gas and a man-made river. Artists, Writers and Filmmakers: from the ancient rock art of the Tassili frescoes to the modernism of Matisse and Klee; from Ibn Battuta to Paul Bowles; from Beau Geste’s French Foreign Legion to Star Wars.
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About this post Publisher: The Bookhugger Crew Tags: Book Heaven / Hell, non-fiction, Sahara desert Posted in: Articles, Interviews Posted on: November 14th, 2011
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