The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night; Volume 9 of 16

The Arabian Nights #9 of 16

by Anonymous, Richard Francis Burton (Translator)

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS (1821-1890) was an English explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, ethnologist, linguist, poet, hypnotist, fencer and diplomat. He was known for his travels and explorations within Asia and Africa as well as his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures. According to one count, he spoke 29 European, Asian, and African languages. He was a captain in the army of the East India Company serving in India. Following this he was engaged by the Royal Geographical Society to explore the east coast of Africa and led an expedition guided by the locals which discovered Lake Tanganyika. His best-known achievements include travelling in disguise to Mecca, making an unexpurgated translation of The Book of One Thousand Nights and a Night. Burton was considered a controversial figure in his day; many considered him a hero, others jealous of his achievements called him a scoundrel. Burton remains possibly the greatest explorer ever because of his remarkable research and uncensored documentation of the lifestyles of the various cultures he encountered in his adventures.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Classics, Fairy Tales

356 pages, Paperback

First published July 23, 2015

About the author

Books can be attributed to "Anonymous" for several reasons:

* They are officially published under that name
* They are traditional stories not attributed to a specific author
* They are religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author

Books whose authorship is merely uncertain should be attributed to Unknown.

See also: Anonymous

Reviews

[James F · Rating 2 out of 5]

Almost to the end of the Nights, these stories were written later than the others and show a falling off of interest; many are near duplicates, especially the last one which is almost identical to the First Lady of Baghdad's tale, but with a male rather than female protagonist. There is also an increase in the overall misogyny of the tales.

The proofreading in this book is alright except for the replacement of characters with accents by Cyrillic letters, "a" with acute accent by Cyrillic "b", "i" with accent by Cyrillic "n" and so forth, probably because they seemed to have that shape to the OCR program they used.. After a while I could guess the original spellings, and it mainly affects proper names and Arabic words in the notes, but it was very annoying in a Project Gutenberg book. (Review of the Project Gutenberg e-book, not necessarily the same edition listed on Goodreads.)

[Hazel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the best volume since volume 1. There are many tales in this book that are just as good as the famous ones from collections of the nights, and is the first volume I would recommend for a read outside of those stories (most of them contained in volume 1 along with some other good tales not found in collections)

It suffers from poor book making practices like many of the others. By which I mean that it starts in the middle of a story that began in the last volume. It also ends with a mere 12 nights left. They could readily have been fitted into this volume, as it is not the thickest of the volumes.