The Life of My Choice

Wilfred Thesiger, this century’s greatest living explorer, reveals the events and people that most influenced his travels through some of the most inaccessible places on earth.


As a child in Abyssinia he watched the victorious armies of Ras Tafari returning from hand-to-hand battle, their prisoners in chains; at the age of twenty-three he made his first expedition into the country of the Danakil, a murderous race among whom a man’s status depended on the number of men he had killed and castrated. His widely acclaimed books, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, tell of his two famous sojourns in the Empty Quarter and the Marshes of southern Iraq. But Thesiger’s true character and motives have until now remained an enigma. In this, his autobiography, he shares some of the experiences that allowed him to live the life of his choice.