blogwallah

Tamerlane

by Justin Marozzi
(Da Capo)

This revisionist history traces the rise of the fourteenth-century warlord Temur—known in the West as Tamerlane—from a crippled peasant boy wandering the steppe to ruler of half the known world. Marozzi asserts that while Temur, like Genghis Kahn, specialized in razing cities and slaughtering their inhabitants, he also had the wisdom to rebuild, and Islamic art and architecture flourished on his watch. Marozzi quotes widely from contemporaneous accounts, relishing the fantastical detail. In India, for example, Temur countered the armored elephants of Delhi with “roaring camels on fire,” then had the defeated beasts brought before him and forced to kneel. Along the way, Marozzi makes a pilgrimage through Temur’s former empire, and argues that the Soviets outdid the warlord in destruction by turning the once fertile basin of Central Asia into a dust bowl.

The New Yorker, June 12, 2006

Chasing the Sea

by Tom Bissell
(Pantheon)

The title of this erratic but enthralling travelogue refers to the attempts of fishermen in Central Asia to pursue the receding waters of the Aral Sea, which has shrunk, since 1960, to less than a third of its original size. In 2001, the author, a self-described “adventure journalist” and failed Peace Corps volunteer, arrives in Uzbekistan to investigate this ecological disaster. Bissell doesn’t so much chase the sea as meander toward it, and nine-tenths of the book concerns his detours—to Samarkand, Bukhara, and the guerrilla-infested mountains of Kyrgyzstan—and his run-ins with suspicious local police forces. Bissell shines as a raconteur, if not as an analyst, and his ebullient narrative harks back to the travel classics of the nineteenth century, when the journey was an end in itself.

The New Yorker, September 29, 2003

Afghanistan

by Chris Steele-Perkins
(Westzone/Trafalgar Square)

In the introduction to this austere collection of photographs, taken on four journeys that Steele-Perkins made through Afghanistan between 1994 and 1998, the French writer André Velter warns us that every report from this country “speaks of devastation, ambushes, torture, mass exodus, absurd fanaticism, even of birds that are slit open.” But, in the pages that follow, amid a grim catalogue of bomb craters and amputees we are given images of eerie ordinariness—a wedding banquet, a merchant catching a melon as it's thrown off a truck, a naked child disappearing through a doorway. This is not a political document but a human one, of a place where menace and tenderness are neighbors. Boys ride wooden horses on a makeshift merry-go-round, laughing at the man with a gun sitting at the center; a woman turns toward the camera, and we glimpse a patch of skin through a small hole in her tattered burka.

The New Yorker, October 1, 2001

An Unexpected Light

by Jason Elliot
(Picador; $30)

As a nineteen-year-old on holiday from his native England, Elliot crossed illegally into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and spent weeks with the mujahideen in the mountains near Kabul. Ten years later, with the Taliban gaining strength, he returned to the country as a journalist, his cowboy streak only slightly tempered by age. What saves this book from being just a swashbuckling travelogue is Elliot’s far-reaching knowledge of Afghan history and his willingness to mock himself. After begging the Afghan fighters to take him on a military operation, he finds himself crouched in a cornfield and suddenly homesick: “I knew then that I lacked the qualities necessary for guerrilla warfare.”

The New Yorker, April 16, 2001