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Title: Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia by Tom Bissell ISBN: 0375421300 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 23 September, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.86
Rating: 5
Summary: a great read
Comment: I was a bit daunted by the prospect of reading a book about an environmental disaster in an area of the world I knew little about, but I couldn't have asked for a better guide than Tom Bissell. He knows a ton about the region, clearly cares a great deal for its people, and combines the details of the country's history with personal stories in a way that is completely compelling. This book has a lot of heart; read it and be moved as well as informed.
Rating: 1
Summary: Fiction vs. Nonfiction
Comment: After viewing the book at a B&N and purchasing it, I came by here to warn other would-be readers. Don't make the same mistake I did. I see the war between the pomo-words-don't-mean anything McSweeny spammers and the innocent public is underway here. As usual, don't believe the McSweeny hype (such as someone insisting that Bissell will be the fiction editor of the New Yorker some day. Who cares? What does that have to do with the fact that his nonfiction book is awful? Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia fails on so many levels).
The corporate funded McSweenys crowd is at it again in full force. It's all about trying to sell as many books to the unsuspecting public as possible. First off, there's a blurb by Jonthan Franzen on the back cover which makes absolutely no sense. Franzen should be more careful with his words. And then, when one opens the book and begins reading, one gets the feeling one is traveling on a bus through Central Asia, filled with MFAs on a creative writing workshop field trip, making snarky comments regarding the native folk, coming up with a marketing plan for the corporate conglomerates. They pull over at an ancient temple, and Bissell hops out, pours some water on his stained t-shirt, and he poses for a picture for the book jacket. Bissel gets his picture taken, uploads it to his imac, and then shares the last half of his granola bar with the boy he's hired to cary his pack, filled with Frommer's travel guides and Let's Go Central Asia. He is on the cell to his literary agent, who has already come up with a couple reviews, and he beams the jacket cover photo back on home. Then he pulls out his yellow pad and a pencil. He can't come up with anything, so Bissell opens "Ecocide in the USSR" by Murray Feshbach and begins translating.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Treasure!
Comment: "Chasing" is a real treasure, and will prove an excellent reference for future scholars keen to gain insight into Tom Bissell's early years. What was on the young writer's mind when he arrived at the Tashkent airport? When he went to Gulistan, who did he meet? What was Bissell's attitude toward alcohol, foreign languages, the Peace Corps? The answers to these key questions are all here.
Surely, as seen in some of the reviews below, Tom Bissell's weltanschauung will not be of interest to everyone. That is hardly the point. You have to ask yourself, where will Bissell's critics be in 15 years time? No doubt still living with their mothers, scribbling away at obscure histories and mocking the society that has rejected them. Meanwhile, Bissell will be sitting pretty--chief fiction editor for The New Yorker perhaps? A sweet gig on the side as a script consultant for a major Hollywood studio?
And why is that? What separates Bissell from his mockers? In a word, talent! And while the question of whether Bissell has any or if he is merely well-connected will be debated on web sites, in newspapers, on National Public Radio, and, ultimately, within Academe, his legions of adoring fans will be able to sit back and watch the fur fly.
Bissell can take heart in the experiences of past luminaries from New York's literary world. Elizabeth Wurtzel, Susan Sontag and Mary McCarthy all heard plenty of catcalls on their journey to the top, but it didn't stop them. As this far-reaching book shows, Bissell has been to Uzbekistan and he's been to Afghanistan. I'm not sure what that proves, because a lot of other people have probably been there too, but if it proves anything at all, it is this: Tom Bissell will not be stopped by a few sniveling whiners!
Yes, "Chasing" has its flaws. As in the lengthy Harper's article which spawned this even lengthier book, readers will hear an echo from Ecocide in the USSR by Murray Feshbach. But as the other Tom of American letters noted: "Good writers borrow. Great writers steal."
Bissell in Harper's, April 2002:
No other industrial society so impartially poisoned its land, water, air, and citizens while at the same time so loudly proclaiming its efforts to improve human health and the condition of the natural world.
Feshbach page 1:
No other great industrial civilization so systematically and so long poisoned its land, air, water and people. None so loudly proclaiming its efforts to improve public health and protect nature so degraded both.
Bissell:
"We cannot expect charity from nature," the Stalinists used to say. "We must tear it from her."
Feshbach 43:
Stalinist planning justified itself with a forthright slogan: "We cannot expect charity from nature, we must tear it from her."
Harper's:
Where surgeons were forced by supply shortages to perform appendectomies with safety razors rather than scalpels.
Feshbach 222:
Ranging beyond Moscow, they could have mentioned the surgeon in a distant part of the Russian Republic who told his colleague, the head doctor of a Moscow hospital, about regularly performing appendectomies with a straight-edge razor, as no scalpels were available.
Harper's:
Soviet joke: What would happen if the Soviet army conquered the Sahara Desert? For fifty years, nothing. Then it would run out of sand.
Feshbach 56:
Hence the stinging joke Soviets told about the likely results of a Red Army conquest of the Sahara: "For fifty years nothing would happen. After that we would have to import sand."
Harper's:
Where factory directors guilty of willfully discharging polluted water into the drinking supply were fined fifty rubles, enough for two packs of imported cigarettes.
Feshbach 115:
In the Krasnoyarsk region, bordering Kansk, seventy factory directors were personally assessed during 1990 for discharging polluted water. The fee in each case was a mere fifty rubles, enough to buy two packs of imported cigarettes.
Harper's:
Where people were so enthused over humankind's new technological prowess they named their daughters Elektrifikatsiya and their sons Traktor
Feshbach 134:
In those early years, some enthusiastic Soviets actually named their daughters Elektrifikatsiya (and their sons Traktor).
Harper's:
Soviet joke: Two doctors are examining a patient. One doctor looks at the other. "Well," he says, "what do you think? Should we treat him or let him live?"
Feshbach 218:
They came, after all, from the ranks of a profession where the standing joke had doctors examining a patient asking one another: "Well, shall we treat him or shall we let him live?"
Harper's:
Whose minister of health in 1989 advised, "To live longer, you must breathe less."
Feshbach 260:
For at least several more perilous years, it will be easier to point to the size of the ecological danger than to define the most cost-effective ways to reduce it and to say with a hollow laugh, as the Russian Republic minister of health had in 1989: "To live longer, you must breathe less."
Harper's:
The Soviet Union was a country where, in 1990, remembering Nikita Khrushchev's boastful promise to overtake and surpass American standards of living, angry, abused, and exhausted protesters marched past the Kremlin carrying placards that read: "Let us catch up with and surpass Africa."
Feshbach 267:
In 1990, however, the crowd carried not Gorbachev's portrait but signs that read: "70 Years on the Road to Nowhere" and in scornful memory of Nikita Khrushchev's boasts about overtaking American standards of living: "Let Us Catch Up with and Surpass Africa."
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Title: The Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland by Karl Ernest Meyer ISBN: 1586480480 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands by Aidan Hartley ISBN: 0871138719 Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Lost in Mongolia : Rafting the World's Last Unchallenged River by Colin Angus ISBN: 0767912802 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Black Earth: A Journey through Russia after the Fall by Andrew Meier ISBN: 0393051781 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 02 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $28.95 |
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Title: Dark Star Safari : Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux ISBN: 0618134247 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
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