Travels with a Tangerine by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

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Travels with a Tangerine by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

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Travels with a Tangerine by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

In 1325, the great Arab traveler Ibn Battutah set out from his native Tangier in North Africa on pilgrimage to Mecca. By the time he returned nearly thirty years later, he had seen most of the known world, covering three times the distance allegedly traveled by the great Venetian explorer Marco Polo--some 75,000 miles in all.

Captivated by Ibn Battutah's account of his journey, the Arabic scholar and award-winning travel writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith set out to follow in the peripatetic Moroccan's footsteps. Traversing Egyptian deserts and remote islands in the Arabian Sea, visiting castles in Syria and innumerable souks in medieval Islam's great cities, Mackintosh-Smith sought clues to Ibn Battutah's life and times, encountering the ghost of "IB" in everything from place names (in Tangier alone, a hotel, street, airport, and ferry bear IB's name), to dietary staples to an Arabic online dating service-- and introducing us to a world of unimaginable wonders.

By necessity, Mackintosh-Smith's journey may have cut some corners ("I only wish I had the odd thirty years to spare, and Ibn Battutah's enviable knack of extracting large amounts of cash, robes and slaves from compliant rulers.") But in this wry, evocative, and uniquely engaging travelogue, he spares no effort in giving readers an unforgettable glimpse into both the present-day and fourteenth-century Islamic worlds.

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Yemen: Adventures in Dictionary Land, Tim Mackintosh-Smith's first book, won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1998 and is today considered a masterpiece of Arabian description. Travels with a Tangerine and The Hall of a Thousand Columns, his two works on Ibn Battutah's exploits in the old Islamic world and in India, were both critically acclaimed. San a, Yemen's capital, has been his home for the past 25 years.

SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9780812971644
ISBN 10 0812971647
Title Travels with a Tangerine
Author Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Random House USA Inc
Year published 2004-06-08
Number of pages 368
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.