BLACK TENTS OF ARABIA, by Carl Raswan, has been praised as a love story, as an adventure story, as a travel book, and as an insider's vision of a much-misunderstood people. It is all of those things, and if Raswan had been given a free hand it would also have been a definitive study of the Arabian Horse; but the editors of Little, Brown, and Company were not horsemen, and in 1934 Raswan was not ye... more...

BLACK TENTS OF ARABIA, by Carl Raswan, has been praised as a love story, as an adventure story, as a travel book, and as an insider's vision of a much-misunderstood people. It is all of those things, and if Raswan had been given a free hand it would also have been a definitive study of the Arabian Horse; but the editors of Little, Brown, and Company were not horsemen, and in 1934 Raswan was not yet famous enough to override them. They made him condense the story of his first year in Arabia to a   less...