Mohammad Farhan

When I am buying a book that doesn’t have an ISBN from a dusty little shop in the middle of Petra (literally) from a vendor who claims to have written the book (unlikely), it’s the flip of coin on whether it will be a dud or a gem. This time, it’s squarely on the dud side.

Written by a local (this I believe, just not the guy selling it in the shop), this book covers much of the generics that I know from my visit – basic Nabatean history, most of the sites, and the background of those sites. The strength is the additional locales that a typical one-day tourist does not see. The weaknesses include the lack of any photo captions, several pages of random photos not associated with written text, insufficient editing of the text resulting in grammar, punctuation, and format errors, and… the worst offense – the lack of a local’s insight on ordinary life. One would think that is the point of the text. But no, it’s mostly on what a local would see, which frankly is quite similar to any tourists’ sightseeing. Other than a couple of obscure paths, none of these is ‘news’. I was hoping to learn more about the Bedouins’ lifestyle on site, where they had lived before they were (forced to) moved out in 1985 when Petra became a UNESCO World Heritage site; some of whom have snuck back to live their traditional nomadic life there. Alas, that’s not in the book – a book by a local. Sigh. Well, it’s my failure to notice when flipping through the book before purchase.… (més)