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Title: Ibn Battutah couldn't have been this dull
Review: I've spent some time in Tangier, where Ibn Battutah is still a well-known name after a lot of centuries, and was happy to see that someone had produced a new look in English on the subject. Regrettably, the focus of this effort is more on the author, Timothy Macintosh-Smith himself than on the intrepid traveler Ibn Battutah. I've no doubt that Mackintosh-Smith is a well-educated and experienced Arabist, but his writing style in this short book is not only stilted and pretentious, it's frequently closeminded and (to my mind) unfair to the alleged subject. There are occasional insights worth having here, but overall, this is not a book that I would recommend.
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