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Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia
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Binding: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 416
Publication Date: 2003-09-23
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Editorial Reviews:
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In 1960, the Aral Sea was the size of Lake Michigan: a huge body of water in the deserts of Central Asia. By 1996, when Tom Bissell arrived in Uzbekistan as a naïve Peace Corps volunteer, disastrous Soviet irrigation policies had shrunk the sea to a third its size. Bissell lasted only a few months before complications forced him to return home, but he had already become obsessed with this beautiful, brutal land.
Five years later, Bissell convinces a magazine to send him to Central Asia to investigate the Aral Sea’s destruction. There, he joins forces with a high-spirited young Uzbek named Rustam, and together they make their often wild way through the ancient cities—Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara—of this fascinating but often misunderstood part of the world. Slipping more than once through the clutches of the Uzbek police, who suspect them of crimes ranging from Christian evangelism to heroin smuggling, the two young men develop an unlikely friendship as they journey to the shores of the devastated sea.
Along the way, 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 sea’s disappearance.
Sometimes hilarious, sometimes powerfully sobering, Chasing the Sea is a gripping portrait of an unfamiliar land and the debut of a gifted young writer.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Been there, done that, GREAT BOOK
Comment: Ever since reading Stein many years ago, I *knew* that I had to go to Central Asia someday to see what was there.
Having just covered the same geography as the author [overland], I would recommend this book as the most realistic on Central Asia of the current batch out there. Yes, he obsesses about his personal demons as a PCV, but the "live narrative" is totally on target. The schizophrenic centrally planned economy, plus the crazy law enforcement plus the sleazy corruption everywhere [in the airport "we have security cameras" --- i.e. place your bribe inside your ticket envelope to get a boarding pass], etc. etc.
I think some of the history a little potted and ripped off from other sources, stressing the blood and guts of the events. But the importance of the Central Asian states and transfer of technology and goods is lost on those of us with a Western education. One can also see the frozen-in-time fallout from the end of the Soviet Union, with people and infrastructure just left to rust into ruin. The collapse of modern states is an issue which will touch all of us at some time in future.
This is a quick and informative way to open you eyes and perhaps to whet your interest in travel to this area.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Highly Readable Book
Comment: Mr. Bissell has written a very entertaining book that is well worth reading. I image him bristling if he ever sees my comments, knowing his scathing sarcasm. Yet his prose is extraordinarily and enormously engaging. I leave it to others to summarize chapters, an exercise in tedium. And should readers choose to ignore this fine book, such descriptions are useless.
I leave only a simple comment: I learned more about Uzbekistan in this volume than I anticipated or planned to know.
The country is bisected. People are analyzed and situations enjoyed, and we readers are welcomed to table and intimate conversations. A terrible thing has happened. I only wish Mr. Bissell had spent more time actually on this lost sea, an environmental catastrophe. The Soviet experiment is something we should all profit from. And this book deserves a greater readership if only for that reason.
Mr. Bissell's work cannot be easily described, as he freely admits at the beginning. This is not a travel document or history, although there are enough of both to satisfy the most ardent traveler or historian. I was only left with one question, an unimportant one that hardly detracts from the work: Is Rustam reliable or a scammer? Mr. Bissell seems not to mind or care, clearly trusting him in many venues and thrusting scarce funds at him for apparently frivolous excuses. Still, I wonder.
Customer Rating:
Summary: You can go home again....but maybe you shouldn't
Comment: Ambivalence is a part of modern life. We can't escape it in the complex modern world. Those who want to live without ambivalence may wind up in some kind of fundamentalist movement that promotes the "only truth". Me, I'm ambivalent about a lot of things. However, sometimes you run across a Mt. Everest of ambivalence, the epitome of having conflicting feelings about something, the man who celebrates Yom Kippur every single day.....God forgive my sins, I am a rotten person. God, save me because I'm not so bad after all. CHASING THE SEA evokes these feelings in me. It's a damn good book in a way, but why do we need to follow the gnashing of the teeth, the midnight soul cringings of one Tom Bissell ? This is a guy who went to Uzbekistan in the Peace Corps, copped out for his own reasons, but couldn't live with them, went back, still didn't much like the place, and wrote a book on his experiences which would definitely get him banned permanently not to mention plunging his Uzbek acquaintances into political difficulties (which could prove fatal in that unlucky land). He undertook to bring money to the wife of an exile---he failed to do so. He finds much of Uzbek life unpleasant; the persistence of Soviet influence, the secret police, the corruption, the violence, the garbage, the lack of compassion for others, the food, the ugly architecture. He likes comfort, but he doesn't much like the 'Americanization' that occurs when the comfort exists. He didn't like most of the Westerners he met, with a few exceptions. What did he like ? Ah, this is where it gets messy. He liked the fact that he went back and wrote about it, though it seems to me he only stayed five weeks. His trip redeemed himself in his own eyes, but he managed to write a grassroots report from Uzbekistan nonetheless. His stated aim was to write about the ecological disaster of the Aral Sea. The book has 353 pages, but he only begins to write about it on page 302. Ambivalence yet again---should I really write what I came to write, or shall I not ? Did I really come to do that, or is it only an excuse to pursue my inner demons? He does write. He does it well. The ending is excellent, perhaps the best part of the book, with a more-than-decent ecological message for everyone.
At one point, Bissell talks to a young Karakalpak man who had been to England. This man remarked that his experience changed everything. "I saw a situation, my own country, that I thought I knew very well, from another point of view. It was like looking into a bottle when you have spent your life seeing it only from the side."
Bissell comments that he then lied and said he knew exactly what the man meant. He lied because he did not like travel, and he admits that he does not see things from another point of view. This is why I have to confess to some ambivalence of my own. For me, Bissell's overarching ambivalence---of going to a place you don't like, to write about things that turn you off, and having experiences that you'd rather not have, missing your comforts, not empathizing with most people---and still doing it---is the downside of this book. An interesting picture of Uzbekistan in modern times, a detailed portrait of a country still finding its way in the community of nations, a country much under the thumb of a dictator--this is the positive side of CHASING THE SEA. So, is it a good book ? You be the judge. I've just set up what I think are the contradictions here. I'm ambivalent.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The worst book I have ever read
Comment: Tom Bissell's journalistic instincts and writing talent are perfectly suited to a career flipping burgers. He spent a few months as Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) in Uzbekistan but couldn't hack it so he left after a few months. He went back a few years later, a transparently pathetic attempt to erase his earlier failure. He fails again.
He meets an actual PCV named Alice who completely torpedoes everything he thinks he knows. He doesn't take her more learned views to heart, nor does he seem to notice the criticism when she says "most of the people who quit are, from what I've heard, completely embarrassed about it." Obliviousness is perhaps the author's most notable trait.
The author believes himself to be witty, well-read and adventurous. On page 17 he writes "A troubling paradox of travel is how consistently superior one feels toward foreigners while at the same time wishing desperately to be accepted by them as unrepresentative of the qualities that make one foreign in the first place." He doesn't realize he's describing himself, not other travelers.
Aside from Uzbekistan, it seems Bissell hasn't traveled at all. "Within stall after booth after stall, confident-looking proprietors hawked Kodak film, pirated CDs, notebooks pens, sausages, soda, and mineral water in at exactly the same price as the kiosk next to them. " Anyone who has traveled in third world countries has noted the odd custom in markets and bazaars everywhere for vendors selling similar wares to group together.
He later observes that "Uzbekistan was the only country I had ever visited where you could walk through a hazardous construction area and no one would stop you or even look at you." How many countries has he visited? In how many of those has he walked through hazardous construction sites? This is ignorance parading as knowledge.
He later mentions "non, a tasty discus of bread of huge cultural and dietary importance in Uzbekistan." Can he really be this clueless? Non, or naan, as we Americans know it, is a staple of diets throughout Asia. He apparently never even been to these places - or even his local Indian or Thai restaurant!
His transliteration of "non" instead of "naan" brings up a bizarre section in which he goes postal on another author, Robert Kaplan. Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts," in which he predicted the breakup of Yugoslavia, is a classic. In "Soldiers of God" Kaplan recounts his travels with the Afghan mujahidin during their fight against the Soviets. And so on. He has lived and traveled around the world. To say that Bissell and Kaplan are both travel writers is like saying Ben Affleck and Ian McKellen are both actors.
Bissell throws a tantrum because he takes Kaplan's observations of Uzbekistan personally: It "does have its ethnocultural problems, as does every nation. Occasionally they have been violent. That said, Uzbekistan's culture is, in my experience , basically tolerant."
Do we believe the man who has spent decades reporting from around the world or the smarmy pretender who quit after a few months?
This is worth mentioning because one of Kaplan's many sins, in Bissell's eyes, is that he transliterates the currency as "soms [sic]." Bissell uses "sums." Big difference, eh? And yet Bissell uses non, not naan. Later he writes "Nebuchadrezzar (misspelled by the Bible as Nebuchadanezzer)." Someone should let him know that the Bible is not a person and thus is not capable of misspelling a name, nor was it written in American English.
Bissell's guide is Rustam, a young man who studied in the US. He begins every sentence with "Dude" and/or ends it with "bro." He makes trenchant cultural observations such as "Dude, I like all chicks." (I swear I am not making this up.) Bissell includes every "dude" and "bro," unaware that this undermines his bona fides as an "adventure journalist," as he describes himself. He seems more like a frat boy on spring break.
The author's choice of company further undermines his credibility. So does this admission: "What I wanted foolishly, was to write about The World. Given my unremarkable credentials, only the Peace Corps could give me that chance ... every MFA program I applied to turned me away." So he became a PCV because he wasn't good enough to become a writer, but when he failed in the Peace Corps he became a writer. He joined the Peace Corps because he had no other options. He failed as an adventurer AND as a writer but now he is an "adventure journalist." What a country.
Literally every page contains a word used incorrectly, an inaccurate metaphor or a comment made out of ignorance. It irritated me at first but I turned it into a game, to find his most egregious offense against the language. I dog-eared nearly every page.
If he doesn't know the correct word, he'll make one up. The list includes abominations like "glass-ceilinged," which he uses as a verb, "guessery," "emotion-mangling," and, my personal favorite, "rubbishing." Rubbish, the noun, is a synonym of trash, but while trash is a verb, rubbish is not. Somebody buy the guy a dictionary, for crying out loud.
There are spectacularly bizarre non sequiturs where he throws in information he finds interesting that doesn't fit anywhere else: "It was useful to remember that, with all of the ecological damage centralized Soviet planning had inflicted upon its colonized lands, Eastern Europe possessed three times the wolves of Western Europe and Romania alone had a larger bear population than all of Western Europe combined." HUH??!!
His presumably weighty observations are gibberish: "Soviet culture was, finally, a culture of suicide - politically, ethnically, ecologically, morally."
There's this nugget of wisdom: "But then Ayn Rand wrote in English, a language not well known for providing philosophers with wings. No, what we had in English was not philosophy but social criticism. This English did very well. If Orwell had written in, say, French, he would no doubt be recognized as a great philosopher, like Camus." And this: "American imperialism was a virus; Soviet imperialism was an entry wound." (No elaboration is offered.)
Moving on from failed attempts at grandiosity to simple ignorance we find him describing a man with "eyes as small and black as a mako's." A mako is a 10-12 foot shark and thus its eyes are small only in comparison with those of a bigger shark. There's a truck with "one of its headlights hanging out of its frame as though it were a popped retina." The retina is the back of the eye.
"Indeed, the crevice between identifying needs and creating solutions ..." A crevice is a crack. What he means is crevasse, which is a chasm. "[T]he fever had cleansed my spirit of its grout." Grout is the mortar that binds tile. It is something to be cleaned, not removed by cleaning. And how about this redundancy: "dumbfounded astonishment."
A leader "did much to scaffold public relations between Uzbeks and Tajiks." Someone who has spent as much time wandering through construction sites around the world should know that a scaffold is not a support or bridge.
His cultural ignorance knows no bounds. As he ponders atrocities that have occurred in Uzbekistan's past he wishes he could ask his guide, in his italics, "What the f--- is wrong with you people?" He seems to think cruelty is a peculiarly Central Asian phenomenon. His ignorance of Genghis Khan is criminal. His broadside against the conqueror shows, at least in his uninformed mind, that he's more informed than the rest of us by calling him, "as we know it, Jenghiz Khan."
Idiocy. The most common English transliteration is, of course, Genghis Khan. (The "soms" comment comes back to mind.) "But Jenghiz was at heart a crude shepherd catapulted into geopolitics," and also a "thug" in the author's estimation.
Wrong. Set aside the fact that Genghis Khan lorded over one of the world's greatest empires. Would a crude shepherd create a constitution which even he was compelled to obey? Or an alphabet? Or a currency and system of measurement to standardize commerce throughout his realm? But Bissell positively foams at the mouth. Genghis Khan's "savagery was without precedent."
Tamerlane was a "psychopath." Bissell wanted to spit on his grave! Of Tamlerlane he writes, "Occasionally, his fondness for the blasphemous became cinematically insane." What does that mean?! Is it fair to expect conquerors from 500 years ago to have been more enlightened than we are in the age of Darfur? His analysis crumbles under the most basic inspection and reveals itself as ethnocentrism.
I finally realized that I was taking too much pleasure in the author's incompetence. I reached a point where, perversely, I was reading a book, not in spite of how bad it was, but because it was so bad. I finally called it quits at page 200." There were so many more examples I could have given. Please don't read this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A good book, not great, not terrible
Comment: This book has sure stirred up a bit of acrimony, based on the other reviews here on amazon.com. No doubt, there are many personal agendas behind both the fiercely positive and fiercely negative reviews. I have no agenda.
To be brief, this was an enjoyable read if you are simply looking for a travel book about Central Asia. I would agree that the title is not the most appropriate as the Aral Sea does seem to take a back seat to other areas of Uzbekistan. And that's okay, if you know going into the read that you are going to get a travelogue and not a scientific treatise.
Mr. Bissell is an interesting writer, but at this point seems to lack a bit of maturity. I am not sure why he felt he needed to slam Robert Kaplan in his book. And I could sure do without all the "dudes" and "bros" and the frat boy references to women. I've no doubt that in twenty years he will look back at some of what he wrote with a bit of maturity and embarrassment himself.
(As an aside, I was a bit disturbed to know that the former Peace Corp Volunteer, Jerod, taught his interpreter to refer to women as bitches!)
That said, read the book. It is going cheap in the used section.
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