Alexander Maitland was not only Sir Wilfred Thesiger's (1910-2003) biographer, but a friend of 40 years who accompanied Thesiger to Buckingham Palace in 1995, when Thesiger was knighted. Maitland's respect for his friend shines through all 544 pages of Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer.
Born in Abyssina (now Ethiopia), Thesiger attended Eton and Oxford, but he began plotting as early as age 14 to return to the Africa he always referred to as "home." This he did, exploring the length of Ethiopia's Awash River in his 20s and then embarking on a life of exploration in northern Africa and the Middle East. He visited England only to see his beloved mother and brothers, and never more often than he had to.
In this biography, Maitland paints a portrait of Thesiger detailed in a way that only the work of a close friend could be. At some points, however, Maitland quotes so prolifically from Thesiger's own books that one wonders why one shouldn't skip the middleman and read the explorer's own works. Nevertheless, Maitland puts his work in order, preserving Thesiger's calm fascination with his travels while filling in the accounts with excerpts from letters, photographs, reports and interviews. The result is a striking and thorough biography of one of Britain's last great explorers. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at Intractable Bibliophilia