Fascinating ... It does not claim to be comprehensive, and is all the better for it; instead, Sattin weaves a deft path through only those elements that interest him ... Sattin triumphantly tells the story of another way of living ... This is a book that does not labour in the fields but gallops full stretch towards the horizon.
A rather ethereal travel writer ... [Sattin's] hopelessly in love with nomads ... That sort of adoration is not conducive to critical thought. Sattin describes nomadic culture in prelapsarian terms — a quiet reminder of Eden in today’s world of greed and perfidy. He repeatedly insists that nomads exhibit a 'sublime harmony . . . with the natural world'. Yet less doe-eyed scholars have discovered that nomads have not always been paragons of green virtue ... Sattin’s subjectivity is nevertheless endearing. As he admits, this book 'is not a scholarly volume . . . nor is it a definitive history of nomads'. It is instead an unashamedly impressionistic paean to nomadic life, a bit of history interwoven with travelogue and memoir. His prose mirrors the nomadic life: it wanders across a landscape of 12,000 years, occasionally stopping to graze, constantly changing direction. Dates and precise places are seldom provided because they are unimportant to those of no fixed abode. Where are we? It doesn’t matter. Sensation, not time or place, is what matters ... In a book of sensitivity and grace, Sattin does not just describe the nomadic way of life, but also evokes it. This is a book of beauty and beguiling rhythm that offers unsettling lessons about our present-day world of borders.
Nomads delivers good stories, and Mr. Sattin makes a fair case for the outsiders, the unsettled, but his wandering folk are a very mixed bag ... Mr. Sattin presents an eccentric, romantic perspective ... Mr. Sattin returns to firmer ground when he describes the pastoral nomads, mounted on horseback, who emerged in the ninth century B.C.
