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25 Works 985 Members 13 Reviews

About the Author

Marq De Milliers is the author of six books on travel, exploration, history, & contemporary politics, including "Into Africa: A Journey Through the Ancient Empires" & "White Tribe Dreaming", his award-winning memoir of growing up in South Africa. He lives in Nova Scotia. (Bowker Author Biography)
Image credit: Marq de Villiers cabottrailwritersfestival.com

Works by Marq de Villiers

Sahara: A Natural History (2002) 163 copies

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Common Knowledge

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Lots of interesting information but parts are hard to follow. I kept wishing it had more graphs or charts to show the interactions of various wind (and water current) patterns.
 
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TanyaRead | 2 other reviews | Feb 14, 2024 |
I enjoyed the chapters about the physical nature of the Sahara much more than the chapters about the peoples of the Sahara. I think that it came down to an impossible task, which was to summarize the histories of dozens of different tribes, invaders, and cities all in a single section of a single book. By necessity the coverage of each group/city had to be brief, and this gave very little feeling for what they were really like. The nature chapters, however, were outstanding.
 
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blueskygreentrees | Jul 30, 2023 |
According to the blurb on the back, this book is "urbane" and "funny", but it actually turned out to be rather dry and boring.
 
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bookhookgeek | May 29, 2019 |
This is what happens when you tell the North Atlantic Ocean to go pound sand.


Sable Island is the narrow 30-mile long exposed part of an large sandbank, sticking out of the ocean about 110 miles east of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is the home of a couple of Canadian coastguards, about 100 semiwild horses, a couple of enzooic insects, a few pods of seals, some hardy plant life, and whatever the wind blows in or the waves wash up. This last includes over 500 shipwrecks, which eerily disappear and reappear into the dunes. The authors attempt to explain the geology, history, flora, fauna and politics of the island; they do an adequate job, but that’s it. The book feels like a magazine a article treated with growth hormone; enough to be interesting but never quite enough of what you want to know.


One section that raised some mental flags was the description of two shells found on the island beaches; a scallop Argopecten irradians and an oyster Crassostrea virginica. The authors make the point that both species are locally extinct, but that they “...thrived in Sable’s lagoons and surrounding waters when temperatures rose after the Ice Age receded.” What bothers me here is while scallops can swim (sort of) and thus have a chance to avoid burial by shifting sands, oysters permanently attach to something and are thus really unlikely to find in an environment like the Sable Island sand bank. Were the shells carried in by currents from elsewhere? Was there a lot more hard ground and less sand in the area? I’ll have to check that out.


Good for an afternoon’s read, not for deep study.
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1 vote
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setnahkt | 1 other review | Dec 19, 2017 |

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Works
25
Members
985
Popularity
#26,140
Rating
½ 3.7
Reviews
13
ISBNs
68
Languages
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