Jul 06 2010
Central Asia Literature
“The Stans.” No, they’re not a new Indie Rock band. They are part of what comprises Central Asia, along with many more Silk Road countries. It’s a region of the world hard to define geographically, hard to understand politically, and even harder to pronounce. Below is a list of literature to help increase our knowledge of the region.
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Ali and Nino
by Kurban Said
First published in Vienna in 1937, this classic story of romance and adventure is Kurban Said’s masterpiece. It is a captivating novel as evocative of the exotic desert landscape as it is of the passion between two people pulled apart by culture, religion, and war.
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Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia
by Tom Bissell
Bissell provides a history of the Uzbeks, recounting their region’s long, violent subjugation by despots such as Jenghiz Khan and Joseph Stalin. He conjures the people of Uzbekistan with depth and empathy, and he captures their contemporary struggles to cope with Islamist terrorism, the legacy of totalitarianism, and the profound environmental and human damage wrought by the Aral Sea’s disappearance.
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The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia
by Peter Hopkirk
The Great Game was the epic stand-off between the two superpowers of the nineteenth century–Victorian Britain and Czarist Russia–for the riches of India and the East. Based on meticulous scholarship and on-the-spot research, Peter Hopkirk’s account covers the history at the core of today’s geopolitics.
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Life Along the Silk Road
by Susan Whitfield
Whitfield creates a portrait of life along the greatest trade route in history in an account that spans the 8th through the 10th centuries. Recounting the lives of ten individuals who lived at different times during this period, Whitfield draws on contemporary sources and uses firsthand accounts whenever possible to reconstruct the history of the route through the personal experiences of these characters.
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News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir
by Peter Fleming
Originally published in 1936, News from Tartary is the story of a 3,500-mile trip across China: from Peking, through the mysterious province of Sinkiang, to India. One of the most difficult trips that could have been made in the 1930s, or even today, the journey took Peter Fleming and his fellow traveler, Kini Maillart, through some of the most desolate country of central Asia.
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The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of Central Asia
by Rafis Abazov
This annotated atlas of Central Asia is the first of its kind that attempts to show the historical backdrop of a region viewed as a separate entity since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Throughout time, Central Asia had been considered part of a larger realm, making an atlas such as this a hugely valuable reference.
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Shadow of the Silk Road
by Colin Thubron
To travel the Silk Road, the greatest land route on earth, is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions, and inventions. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart, and camel, Colin Thubron covered some seven thousand miles in eight months.
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The Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin
by Mukhamet Shayakhmetov
The Silent Steppe is a story of a family living through one of the most traumatic periods of Soviet history, as seen through the eyes of a young boy growing up in a family of Kazakh nomads. It encompasses the horrors of political persecution and famine in the 1930s, and culminates in the author’s first-hand account of the Battle of Stalingrad and his long trek home through freezing winter conditions after being wounded and discharged from the Red Army.
