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Overview
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—out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey—and explored an ancient world in modern ferment.
Synopsis
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—out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey—and explored an ancient world in modern ferment.
The New York Times Book Review - Lorraine Adams
With its elegiac tone, Shadow of the Silk Road is moving in a way that s rare in travel literature, sidestepping nostalgia even as it notes its pull. Thubron goes to places most other sojourners can t—because they re not so much geographic locations as states of mind, formed from the lifelong accretion of intriguing facts, mistaken hopes, mysteries. Here, on civilization s oldest and longest road, which isn t quite a road, he has found his way into that kingdom and brought it into focus for us.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
If you've ever felt that travel writing too often succumbs to travelogue, where one exotic landscape and people blend into the next, it's time to accompany Colin Thubron on his extraordinary 7,000-mile journey along the Silk Road from Xian, China, to Antioch (Antakaya), Turkey. Following a route he freely admits is a "ghost" that has "officially vanished," using his decent Mandarin to record conversations (and occasional interviews with suspicious border guards) that lesser writers would miss, he weaves elegant observation and reflection into an engrossing, at times hallucinatory account of this perilous route through the "world's heart." And he describes its role in the violent spread of commerce, culture, and warring tribal identities.Lorraine Adams
"Moving in a way that’s rare in travel literature...Thubron goes to places most other sojourners can’t."Jonathan Yardley
"[Thubron is] intrepid, resourceful . . . and immensely talented . . . a splendid book."New York Magazine
"A fantastically descriptive writer, Thubron digs through the history of Central Asia...Perfect for vicarious travelers."Providence Journal
"Splendid…Sumptuously detailed, elegantly written and riveting...Thubron misses nothing."San Francisco Chronicle
"Thubron has done it all, with sparkling grace . . . He is a brilliant brooder, artful in his melancholy."New York magazine
“A fantastically descriptive writer, Thubron digs through the history of Central Asia...Perfect for vicarious travelers.”Harper's Magazine
"An exhausting journey and a marvelous book."Booklist
"An illuminating account of a breathtaking journey."Lorraine Adams
With its elegiac tone, “Shadow of the Silk Road” is moving in a way that’s rare in travel literature, sidestepping nostalgia even as it notes its pull. Thubron goes to places most other sojourners can’t—because they’re not so much geographic locations as states of mind, formed from the lifelong accretion of intriguing facts, mistaken hopes, mysteries. Here, on civilization’s oldest and longest road, which isn’t quite a road, he has found his way into that kingdom and brought it into focus for us.—The New York Times Book Review
Jonathan Yardley
"...[Thubron] is a scholar as well as a traveler and writer, with the result that Shadow of the Silk Road is as much a history lesson as a contemporary adventure. All in all, a splendid book."—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
In his latest absorbing travel epic, Thubron (In Siberia; Mirror to Damascus) follows the course—or at least the general drift—of the ancient network of trade routes that connected central China with the Mediterranean Coast, traversing along the way several former Soviet republics, war-torn Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. The author travels third-class all the way, in crowded, stifling railroad cars and rattle-trap buses and cars, staying at crummy inns or farmers' houses, subject to shakedowns by border guards and constant harassment—even quarantine—by health officials hunting the SARS virus. Physically, these often monotonously arid, hilly regions of Central Asia tend to go by in a swirl of dun-colored landscapes studded with Buddha shrines in varying states of repair or ruin, but Thubron's poetic eye still teases out gorgeous subtleties in the panorama. Certain themes also color his offbeat encounters with locals—most of them want to get the hell out of Central Asia—but again he susses out the infinite variety of ordinary misery. The conduit by which an entire continent exchanged its commodities, cultures and peoples—Thubron finds traces of Roman legionaries and mummies of Celtic tribesmen in western China—the Silk Road becomes for him an evocative metaphor for the mingling of experiences and influences that is the essence of travel. (July 3)
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