Cleopatra's Wedding Present: Travels Through Syria

by RobertTewdwrMoss (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $5.46

  Though Syria has begun to open itself up to the foreign traveller, for many of us it remains a sinister and forbidding destination. Syria's monumentally unwelcoming state apparatus - and its fraught politics - could defeat even the most determined adventurer. As the idlest and most easy-going of explorers, Robert Tewdwr Moss side-steps danger to luxuriate in Turkish baths and muse on the ironies of life and love. His Syria is also a place of contrasts: from concrete esplanades swept by hot dusty winds and all-seeing electronic eyes, with images of President Assad lined up side by side in surreal massed ranks, to deserted back streets where mud-brick houses collapse into themselves like melted chocolate. He visits the legendary city of Palmyra and stumbles upon a shred of 2000-year-old mummy. After helping to rescue the relics from an ossuary of Armenian massacre-victims, he leaves a bagful of bones on a bus. He is publicly denounced by a paranoid alcoholic London writer and stoned by Saddam-sympathizing youths in Syria's restive eastern provinces. He follows in the footsteps of a 19th-century English lady traveller, and falls hopelessly in love with a Palestinian ex-commando. Robert Tewdwr Moss's Syria is a dour, disturbing land - a place which attracts the oddest characters and where the oddest things happen.

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $4.77

  Robert Tewdwr Moss' Syria is a place of contrasts. From the legendary city of Palmyra and its mysterious carved deities to the collapsing mud-brick houses of the deserted back streets, Cleopatra's Wedding Present takes the reader on a journey that is exotic, scurrilous and thoroughly entertaining. Tewdwr Moss, a brilliant young writer who was murdered in London the day he finished the book, left this lyrical gem as his legacy. A memoir of his travels through Syria and his exploration into the region's culture and explosive politics, it conveys what so many westerners find both fascinating and frightening in the Middle East. A chilling history of ethnic crimes, a picaresque adventure story, a colourful travelogue and a poignant romance, it captivates from the very first page.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1997

  $3.35

  Though Syria has begun to open itself up to the foreign traveller, for many of us it remains a sinister and forbidding destination. Syria's monumentally unwelcoming state apparatus - and its fraught politics - could defeat even the most determined adventurer. As the idlest and most easy-going of explorers, Robert Tewdwr Moss side-steps danger to luxuriate in Turkish baths and muse on the ironies of life and love. His Syria is also a place of contrasts: from concrete esplanades swept by hot dusty winds and all-seeing electronic eyes, with images of President Assad lined up side by side in surreal massed ranks, to deserted back streets where mud-brick houses collapse into themselves like melted chocolate. He visits the legendary city of Palmyra and stumbles upon a shred of 2000-year-old mummy. After helping to rescue the relics from an ossuary of Armenian massacre-victims, he leaves a bagful of bones on a bus. He is publicly denounced by a paranoid alcoholic London writer and stoned by Saddam-sympathizing youths in Syria's restive eastern provinces. He follows in the footsteps of a 19th-century English lady traveller, and falls hopelessly in love with a Palestinian ex-commando. Robert Tewdwr Moss's Syria is a dour, disturbing land - a place which attracts the oddest characters and where the oddest things happen.