In 1978 Eric Hansen found himself shipwrecked on a desert island in the Red Sea. When goat smugglers offered him safe passage to Yemen, he buried seven years' worth of travel journals deep in the sand and took his place alongside the animals on a leaky boat bound for a country that he'd never planned to visit.As he tells of the turbulent seas that stranded him on the island and of his efforts to retrieve his buried journals when he returned to Yemen ten years later, Hansen enthralls us with a portrait -- uncannily sympathetic and wildly offbeat -- of this forgotten corner of the Middle East. With a host of extraordinary characters from his guide, Mohammed, ever on the lookout for one more sheep to squeeze into the back seat of his car, to madcap expatriates and Eritrean gun runners- and with landscapes that include cities of dreamlike architectural splendor, endless sand dunes, and terrifying mountain passes, Hansen reveals the indelible allure of a land steeped in custom, conflicts old and new, and uncommon beauty.

Yemen is the dark horse of the Middle East. Every so often it enters the headlines for one alarming reason or another—links with al-Qaeda, kidnapped Westerners, explosive population growth—then sinks into obscurity again. But, as Victoria Clark argues in this riveting book, we ignore Yemen at our peril. The poorest state in the Arab world, it is still dominated by its tribal makeup and has become a perfect breeding ground for insurgent and terrorist movements.Clark returns to the country where she was born to discover a perilously fragile state that deserves more of our understanding and attention. On a series of visits to Yemen between 2004 and 2009, she meets politicians, influential tribesmen, oil workers and jihadists as well as ordinary Yemenis. Untangling Yemen’s history before examining the country’s role in both al-Qaeda and the wider jihadist movement today, Clark presents a lively, clear, and up-to-date account of a little-known state whose chronic instability is increasingly engaging the general reader.

Looking for a life of adventure after graduating from the medical school of the American University of Beirut, Tareq (not his real name), a young American doctor, decides to journey to Yemen to work there for the government on a one-year contract in its hospital in Sana'a, the capital. He leaves behind a comfortable life in Lebanon and must now adjust to the harsh and primitive life in Yemen. While he is there, the young doctor is given insight to the Imam's, the religious ruler of Yemen, absolute bloodthirsty power, through treachery, intimidation, and brutality, and he describes stories of tribal uprisings, beheadings, drug addiction, child marriages, and other true horror stories.Sojourn in a Dreadful Land is a fascinating and shocking tale about life and hardship in Yemen in the 1950s. The young American doctor's idea of adventure slowly turns into a nightmare as he records his life in this journal.

  "I had no idea how to find my way around this medieval city. It was getting dark. I was tired. I didn’t speak Arabic. I was a little frightened. But hadn’t I battled scorpions in the wilds of Costa Rica and prevailed? Hadn’t I survived fainting in a San José brothel?  Hadn’t I once arrived in Ireland with only $10 in my pocket and made it last two weeks? Surely I could handle a walk through an unfamiliar town. So I took a breath, tightened the black scarf around my hair, and headed out to take my first solitary steps through Sana’a."-- from The Woman Who Fell From The Sky In a world fraught with suspicion between the Middle East and the West, it's hard to believe that one of the most influential newspapers in Yemen--the desperately poor, ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden, which has made has made international headlines for being a terrorist breeding ground--would be handed over to an agnostic, Campari-drinking, single woman from Manhattan who had never set foot in the Middle East. Yet this is exactly what happened to journalist, Jennifer Steil.  Restless in her career and her life, Jennifer, a gregarious, liberal New Yorker, initially accepts a short-term opportunity in 2006 to teach a journalism class to the staff of The Yemen Observer in Sana'a, the beautiful, ancient, and very conservative capital of Yemen. Seduced by the eager reporters and the challenging prospect of teaching a free speech model of journalism there, she extends her stay to a year as the paper's editor-in-chief. But she is quickly confronted with the realities of Yemen--and their surprising advantages.  In teaching the basics of fair and balanced journalism to a staff that included plagiarists and polemicists, she falls in love with her career again. In confronting the blatant mistreatment and strict governance of women by their male counterparts, she learns to appreciate the strength of Arab women in the workplace. And in forging surprisingly deep friendships with women and men whose traditions and beliefs are in total opposition to her own, she learns a cultural appreciation she never could have predicted.  What’s more, she just so happens to meet the love of her life.  With exuberance and bravery, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky offers a rare, intimate, and often surprising look at the role of the media in Muslim culture and a fascinating cultural tour of Yemen, one of the most enigmatic countries in the world.

In 1934, famed British traveler Freya Stark sailed down the Red Sea, alighting in Aden, located at the tip of the Arabian peninsula. From this backwater outpost, Stark set forth on what was to be her most unforgettable adventure: Following the ancient frankincense routes of the Hadhramaut Valley, the most fertile in Arabia, she sought to be the first Westerner to locate and document the lost city of Shabwa. Chronicling her journey through the towns and encampments of the Hadhramaut, The Southern Gates of Arabia is a tale alive with sheikhs and sultans, tragedy and triumph. Although the claim to discovering Shabwa would not ultimately be Stark's, The Southern Gates of Arabia, a bestseller upon its original publication, remains a classic in the literature of travel. This edition includes a new Introduction by Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Stark's biographer.

In this follow-up to THE SOUTHERN GATES OF ARABIA, Freya Stark chronicles a winter spent in the heart of the Hadhramaut Desert excavating what may have been one of the ancient cities of South Arabia. While traces of an earlier civilization were being uncovered Stark recorded the day-to-day life of an Arab town rarely visited by outsiders. Through the expressiveness of her prose she brings to life the figures of the villagers with whom she lived. "I do not see how her books can avoid their obvious destiny, inclusion in the aristocracy of letters." (The Evening Star, London)

Combining outstanding photographic skills with assiduous research, this book takes the reader on a fascinating journey through Yemen"Absolutely gorgeous" --Sandi Toksvig, BBC Radio 4The sophisticated traveler is fast awakening to the glories and treasures of Yemen, the land of the half-mythic Queen of Sheba and the "Arabia Felix" coveted by ancient Rome. Yet the "glories and treasures" of Yemen are as much contemporary as they are ancient and historic--in the spectacular architecture of its cities, which until lately have remained beyond the ken of the outside world, the dramatic landscape of highland and coastal Yemen, and in the panoply of its people.Yemen: Jewel of Arabia's thorough coverage will prove indispensable to the visitor. This book, long in the making, is now the only photographic work generally available to the English-speaking visitor or armchair traveler.

Yemen is arguably the most fascinating and least known country in the Arab world. Classical geography described it as a fabulous land where flying serpents guarded incense groves. Medieval Arab visitors told of disappearing islands and menstruating mountains. Our current ideas of this country at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula have been overrun by images of the desert, by oil, by the Gulf War-but there is another Arabia. Writing with an intimacy and a depth of knowledge gained through thirteen years among the Yemenis, Mackintosh-Smith is a traveling companion of the best sort-erudite, witty, and eccentric. Crossing mountain, desert, ocean, and three millennia of history, he reveals a land that, in the words of a contemporary poet, has become the dictionary of its people. In Yemen: The Unknown Arabia we witness the extraordinary in the ordinary. Yemen is a part of Arabia, but it is like no place on earth, and Yemen is a book in which every page is filled-like the land it describes-with the marvelous.

The islands of Socotra lie some 190 nautical miles off the southern coast of Yemen, in the Gulf of Aden. Their relative isolation merely hints at their extraordinary foreignness. Like a lesser Galapagos, these islands boast flora and fauna found nowhere else on Earth. Moreover, the Socotran people have their own language (which lacks a script) and distinctive culture, cuisine and architecture: neither Arabian nor African, yet strongly and distinctively Socotran.Richard Boggs spent many months in this remote and other-worldly archipelago, mixing with the Socotran peoples and capturing in world class photographs the uniqueness of the land and its life. The Lost World of Socotra brings this remarkable location to a new audience and is, truly, a journey through lands like no other.