(Because I couldn't keep it to five...)
Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger
For me, this will always remain THE definitive book of Arabian adventure travel, an inspirational description of the author’s epic journeys across the Empty Quarter of Arabia in the late 1940s. Years later, after I had met Thesiger, I accompanied him to a meeting with Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi. The two old men recounted how they had been so hungry on one expedition that when the sheikh threw a rabbit carcass to his dog Thesiger had snatched it back and eaten it himself.