2.75 stars
This is a loving miscellany of camel that attempts neither seriousness nor humour. It's very pleasingly presented with lots of nice artwork (including far more diagrams of camel saddles than I really needed to see) and a pretty font, thick paper, wide margins and such. Irwin's style is well suited to the camel in that it is dry, but I learned a few interesting things. He does barely anything towards deconstructing or interrogating the orientalism of most of his many texts; this is not an earnest quest for truth but an availability-sampled smorgasbord.