Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia (Vintage Departures)
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In 1996, Tom Bissell went to Uzbekistan as a na•ve Peace Corps volunteer. Though he lasted only a few months before illness and personal crisis forced him home, Bissell found himself entranced by this remote land. Five years later he returned to explore the shrinking Aral Sea, destroyed by Soviet irrigation policies. Joining up with an exuberant translator named Rustam, Bissell slips more than once through the clutches of the Uzbek police as he makes his often wild way to the devastated sea. In Chasing the Sea, Bissell combines the story of his travels with a beguiling chronicle of Uzbekistan’s striking culture and long history of violent subjugation by despots from Jenghiz Khan to Joseph Stalin. Alternately amusing and sobering, this is a gripping portrait of a fascinating place, and the debut of a singularly gifted young writer. Read more
Publisher : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date : October 12, 2004
Edition : Reprint
Language : English
Print length : 416 pages
ISBN-10 : 037572754X
ISBN-13 : 42
Item Weight : 11.4 ounces
Dimensions : 5.24 x 0.91 x 7.99 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #2,616,940 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #115 in General Russia Travel Guides #2,519 in Russian History (Books) #17,022 in Sociology Reference
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Top Amazon Reviews
_Chasing the Sea_ is one of the finer travel books I have read in some time. Author Tom Bissell set out originally to cover the tragic disappearance of the Aral Sea, a once large inland body of water shared by Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan that has been slowly choked to death since the 19th century by diversion of the water to grow cotton. Through the course of the book though he not only covers the Aral Sea but also relates his previous personal experiences with Uzbekistan - he served for a time as a Peace Corps volunteer - as well as his current travels. Though he left the Peace Corps, his love for this Central Asian nation didn't leave him and he felt compelled to return, not only to his host family but to the country in general. We learn that Uzbekistan is the second largest exporter of cotton in the world; though this achievement has not come without considerable cost (also amazingly enough they grow rice too). That this desert nation relies so heavily economically on such a thirsty plant is unusual, but Bissell details how the American Civil War cut off the supply of cotton, encouraging tsarist Russia to look for a new source. Demand for cotton only escalated during the Cold War. To grow the cotton, the Amu Darya River (known in antiquity as the Oxus) was diverted. This river, which forms part of Uzbekistan's southern border and the primary source of the Aral Sea's water, now no longer feeds into it at all. The formerly vast river, which once formed a huge inland delta, is now a mere creek at best as it reaches the receding shores of the Aral. The Aral Sea's certain demise sometime in the first few decades of the 21st century will have ugly consequences. As late as 1960 the Aral Sea was still the fourth-largest inland body of water in the world; now it is largely salt-crusted, dust-storm swept desert, much of this salt and silt poisonous thanks to decades of Soviet insecticides and dumped toxic waste. Moynaq, once a prosperous seaside community that had 40,000 inhabitants, was a favored beach retreat, and had a cannery that produced 12 to 20 million tins of fish a year; now over a hundred miles from the sea's present (and still receding) shores, it is a near ghost town with no jobs to speak of. Fishing ships lie where they were abandoned, resting incongruously in sand dunes. Now that the Aral Sea has thus far lost over 70% of its water volume it no longer acts to moderate regional temperatures; summers are hotter and winters are colder (possibly ironically dooming the very crops that are being grown at the expense of the sea). The two dozen fish species that were once endemic to the Aral Sea are now extinct (though other species were later reintroduced to the northern Kazakhstan portion). The formerly unique desert forests that surrounded the lake are long gone as well. More tragic still are those people who live around the Aral Sea. For over 600 years the Karakalpaks, a formerly nomadic people, have called these shores home. Now they are poor and unhealthy, as their industries - fishing, canning, and shipbuilding - have vanished and they suffer soaring rates of infant mortality, tuberculosis, and other diseases directly and indirectly related to the vanished desert sea. I don't however want to give the impression that this is a grim book, as there are many funny sections in it and Bissell is a talented writer. Nor is the Aral Sea the only subject covered. It is not even the main subject of this travel essay. Most of the book is devoted to Bissell's travels, most of them with a young Uzbek named Rustam, hired as a translator but becoming a friend as he journeyed throughout Uzbekistan, from the T'ien Shan Mountains and Ferghana Valley in the far east of the nation through Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara. Along the way the author relates many interest aspects of Uzbek history and culture, including the days of the Mongols, Timur (known in the West as Tamerlane), the Samanid dynasty of 819-1005 (during which time Uzbekistan became a center of Islamic learning, producing the great doctor ibn Sina, known to Westerners as Avicenna, revered in the West as late as 1700s, and al-Khorezmi, from whose name the word algorithm is derived), the Great Game (the 19th century Cold War of sorts between Russia and the British for supremacy in Central Asia), and the rule of Islam Karimov. I found his portraits of the various cities the most interesting aspect of the book. Tashkent for example we learn is not only the most populous city in Uzbekistan but the most populous in Central Asia. It is also one of the most modern seeming Central Asian cities, as there is very little architecture older than about 50 years (owing partly to the fact that the city has been Russified since the late 19th century and partly due to a massive 1966 earthquake). Despite is appearances though this oasis city (its name means "Stone City") is over 2000 years old, making it one of the oldest extant cities in the world. For much of its history it was a "sporadically independent city-state" surrounded by a famous high stone wall sixteen miles long (now completely gone) and controlled at times by such various groups as the Arabs, Chinese, Mongols, and the Kazakhs. Bissell also has many asides in the book about Uzbek culture. He wrote of the very nature of Uzbek, an agreed-upon identity that is less than a century old; that in 1902 a Russian ethnographer noted that there were more 80 clan names in Uzbekistan, more important to them than any "Uzbek" identity. Indeed, Uzbek history in any form only stretches back to the 14th century, when a fierce group of nomadic invaders came down from the plains of southern Siberia. A good book, just wish it had pictures.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2004 by Tim F. Martin
I have been a fan of Tom Bissell's writing ever since I came across it in Harper's Magazine. I specifically remember reading a short story set in Central Asia that eventually would be included in his entertaining short story collection God Lives in St. Petersberg and Other Stories. There were other nonfiction pieces as well, starting with the magazine version of what would become a book about his father, who fought in the Vietnam war, and later their trip back to Vietnam: The Father of All Things. And also, the magazine article about the natural disaster that is the Aral Sea that begat this book, Chasing The Sea: Lost Among The Ghost Of Empire In Central Asia (2003). I doubted that I would ever read this book, thinking it would be unlikely that I would develop an interest in Central Asia. Well, since I am returning there for a second visit (the first was five years ago in 2010), to Kyrgyzstan again for a volunteer conference in English language education. I figured that this book would be good background reading for a return visit, and it was. In fact there were some sections that took place in Kyrgyzstan and all countries in the region must be referred to when talking about the history of the region. This book is one of those books that is hard to describe and pin down, something the Marketing department loved I am sure. It is a personal memoir of Bissell's connection to the region, which began as a largely unsuccessful stint with the Peace Corps where he lost it and quit nine months into stay. It is also a sort of travelogue that allows him to ruminate on the upheavals that have rocked the region and Uzbekistan throughout the centuries. It is also an act of reportage on Uzbekistan as it was when he was traveling there in the early 2000s. Despite these threads, there is yet another, it is also largely about his earthy, idiosyncratic translator Rustam, who guides him throughout the novel dropping bon mots of wisdom along the way in his American slang-laced vocabulary. Bissell eventually makes his way to the Aral Sea where his reportage on the human devastation of this lake ended up as a Harper's Magazine article and the impetus for this book.That being said this section of the book is a scant 50 pages: it's the journey, not the destination that matters. I think it is, here, in this book, that Bissell takes Robert D. Kaplan to task for uninformed reporting in the region and scare-mongering. (I know that I read another article somewhere in which Bissell questions many of Kaplan's conclusion about this region and questions observation made while reporting). I used to be something of a Kaplan devotee, and still thinks he can bring a lot of insight into the regions he visits. But the scare-mongering has been his calling card which has become stale and I lost a lot of respect for him infatuation with Marines when he was embedded with them for his books Imperial Grunts, which is less than objective. However there are many memorable descriptions of people, cities, the surroundings, poor driving, bad food, and excellent descriptions and similes that were clever and engaging.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2015 by Patrick Mc Coy