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Shifting Sands

A Human History of the Sahara

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Shifting Sands

By: Judith Scheele
Narrated by: Lucy Paterson
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Summary

 Blue-veiled nomads, camels crossing infinite dunes, oases shimmering on the horizon: ready-made images of the Sahara are easy to conjure. But they can never tell the full story of a region that crosses eleven countries, is home to millions and sits at the heart of countless international struggles.

This sweeping account confronts and upends old fantasies, revealing the far more startling reality of our world's largest hot desert. Drawing on decades of research, and years spent living in the region, anthropologist Judith Scheele takes us from Libya to Mali, Algeria to Chad, from the ancient Roman Empire to the bloody colonial era to contemporary regional battles and fraught international diplomacy, questioning every easy cliché and exposing fascinating truths along the way.

From the geology of the region, to the life it shelters, to the religions, languages and cultural and political forces that shape and fracture it, this is a landmark work that tells the compelling story of a place that sits at the heart of our world, and whose future holds implications for us all.©2025 Judith Scheele Africa Anthropology Ecosystems & Habitats Human Geography Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Politics & Government Science Social Sciences World Colonial Period Middle East
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As someone really interested in social anthropology this was a perfect book for me, it allowed me to learn a lot about Saharan people of both the past and the present. I also enjoyed that the book was organized by theme and not chronologically

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