5 books
Wilfred Thesiger
Thesiger crossed the Empty Quarter twice in the late forties, on camels, with a few Bedu who’d have gotten there a lot faster without him. His paper job was scouting locust grounds for the British. Everybody knew that was an…
Sanmao
Sanmao was a Taiwanese writer who read one article about the Sahara and moved there, marrying a Spanish diver named José and settling in El Aaiún in the Spanish Sahara in the 1970s. These are her dispatches: Building furniture out…
Jared D. Margulies
There’s a global black market in rare cacti and succulents, and Margulies spent years inside it — with collectors, growers, smugglers, customs officers, and conservation scientists across Europe, Asia, Mexico, and South Africa. Plants poached out of the ground in…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
A pilot crashes in the Sahara with eight days of water and a broken engine, and a small boy appears out of nowhere asking him to draw a sheep. The boy is from an asteroid the size of a house,…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
Frenchman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wasn’t just the writer of The Little Prince, he was a pilot who helped pioneer postal aviation in the 1920s, when planes barely had instruments (he lamented that pilots of later, more-advanced planes were little more…
