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| Shadow of the Silk Road | 
 enlarge | Author: Colin Thubron
Publisher: HarperCollins
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $13.00
You Save: $12.95 (50%)
Buy New/Used/Collectible from $13.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  (22 reviews)
Sales Rank: 114143
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 006123172X
Dewey Decimal Number: 915.8
EAN: 9780061231728
ASIN: 006123172X
Publication Date: July 1, 2007
Release Date: July 3, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Slogging along in the Shadows of the Silk Road March 8, 2008
10 out of 14 found this review helpful
Barren landscapes, indigenous people desperate to leave; temples and monuments crumbling in ruin and the author covers it all in three hundred and forty four pages of barren text leaving the reader desperate to leave the book. Traveling the Silk Road could have been a fascinating adventure but this book offers no insight, portrays no curiousity as to why things are they way they are and if you can make it to the end of the journey you have endured!There are numerous better sources of first hand accounts of adventure travel in these regions. It is simply too hard to find kind words, a compliment, or a recommendation for this book.
 Good, but not great January 26, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I bought this book hoping to get a good idea of what the people and places are like along The Silk Road. This book has some very interesting interviews with people along the way, but after a while, it these become less frequent and the book is more about "I came here and saw this. It looked like this. It made me feel like this, then I left and went here." I could have bought another book with pictures of the Silk Road and been better off in this regard. To me, the best part of the book was what he learned talking to people. Unfortunately, that makes up only a small part of his journey.
Not a bad book, and I don't have regrets buying it, but I did start to look forward to finishing it so I could move on to the next one.
 A rare beauty January 10, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I heard an interview of the author on NPR and his clarity, passion, and humanity led me straight to the library.
I have not been the least disappointed in this beautiful book, which is not so much a travel book to me, but a book about thousands of years of fragile human perceptions both tragic and beautiul. It forced my own introspection as much as it tells a story of a world I have never experienced. This is a book I will buy prior to reading it again.
The Blood Stained Road December 31, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Once again, I travel the Silk Road but this time as an armchair traveler. Thubron has created a literary landscape that makes my sedentary journey as colorful and captivating as my travels in 1993.
Thubron's account of the Silk Road is a literary treasure. Throughout his narrative I found myself caught somewhere between being captivated by his perceptive observations, which were seldom judgemental yet always intensely personal and enthralled by his pictorial prose, laden with metaphor and similie.
What makes Thubron's book different from other travel writings is the mystery that is conveyed. Other writers describe what can be seen, Thubron gives us a picture of what no longer exists; the unseen. So much of the Silk Road lays in ruins or lies buried. So many obscure civilizations were brutally leveled with few, if any remnants remaining. Thubron resurrects the conquerers who obliterated the once bustling metropolises: Qin Shi, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, and Hasan-i-Sabah. He makes them accountable, not for what remains but what they destroyed and took away. Then he explores what might have been with the rationale of an historian and geographer. The Silk Road transcends from a geographical route and is vividly portrayed as a sequence of historical occurrences that stretch for centuries across a continent.
The weakness of the book is the maps. They are not always accurate: ie. Pakistan's border with China has been replaced with Afghanistan.
 A path through the ancient and modern world December 23, 2007
Thubron makes the Silk Road come alive with both his eye for contemporary detail and his knowledge of its history. The paradoxes of the modern world are evident throughout--the embrace of Western popular culture and the weariness with Western values, for example. Thubron goes the local route and suffers most of the same inconveniences and indignities as the locals and provides insight into the response to SARS and the reaction to recent conflicts in the region. I knocked off a star for a collection of minor reasons: The maps are of limited use; there is an elliptical quality to several parts of the book and it appears that content was deleted (e.g., Tubron has letters for two friends who are never heard of again after mention of the letters); the purpose of the trip seems to get lost and the ending is a bit abrupt; and a bibliography would have been helpful. Even so, this is a book that beautifully captures details about people, places, and time.
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