Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared

Hard to put down, engrossing book on Kazakhstan. The writing is excellent. I feel grateful to the author for the time and energy he put into this book. You learn about the history of the country, its president, its people and the land. Could not be better!

My wife was the intended first reader of this book, but I stole it away from her and had trouble putting it down after finding it incredibly engaging. We adopted a girl from Kazakhstan in the spring of 2004 and found the country amazing, so I was eager to read a recent, in-depth narrative. Robbins's travelogue is informative, witty, and compelling. His deep admiration for Kazakhs is well-founded. Anyone who has spent time traveling in KZ and getting to know the people will agree that they really are a remarkable people. What they endured at hands of the former USSR is unimaginable to most Westerners, certainly to anyone who never lived under Soviet Communism. His interviews of gulag survivors, drivers, businesspeople, scholars, artists, and even President Nazarbayev are first-rate, and his descriptions of the country's history, geography, politics, and religion are well-researched and highly readable. His style is more urbane than Bill Bryson's yet just as funny sometimes, and the humorous anecdotes and vignettes contrast sharply with horrifying, first-hand accounts from Kazakhs who survived Soviet brutality. The fact that most Kazakhs don't intensely hate Russia today is a testament to their strength as a people. One of the most interesting sections concerns Dostoevsky's five years of required exile in Semipalatinsk, KZ, which seemed like heaven after four wretched years in a Siberian penal colony. Semipalatinsk remains an environmental nightmare thanks to radioactive contamination left from decades of Russian above-ground nuclear testing. It ranks alongside the Aral Sea as one of the world's greatest environmental reclamation projects. I came away from this book with an even deeper admiration for the Kazakh people than I had four years ago. This country has potential for greatness, and those who read Robbins' book will understand why.

For anyone interested in this fascinating region, or the armchair traveler, this book is a must!

This is a strange mixture of a travelogue and an anecdotal history of Kazakhstan. Robbins characterizes Kazakhstan as an ancient country which has been long forgotten in the West, and he seeks to rediscover the diversity of its past and present. He describes his travels from the wild steppes of the central country, to the old capital at Almaty, to the nightclubs of the brash new modern capital at Astana. As we travel, he provides interesting historical side stories on the Kazakhstan exiles of Trotsky, Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn; on Sakharov's witnessing of the first Soviet H-bomb tests; and on the horrific forced labor camps of Stalin's Gulag. He also recounts many other fragments of its history, not least that indeed "apples are from Kazakhstan". As part of his visit, Robbins had multiple interviews with President Nazarbayev and was allowed to travel with him during a tour of some of Kazakhstan's remoter areas. Nazarbayev's quoted reminiscences are interesting, especially around the fall of the Soviet Union and the birth of independent Kazakhstan (although like all politician's memoirs, his words should probably be read cautiously). Robbins has clearly benefited from Nazarbayev's help and in return he is notably delicate in addressing potentially awkward issues. There have been allegations of significant high level corruption in Kazakhstan and of the forcible discouraging of political opposition, but these are not topics that Robbins dwells on. On the plus side, Robbins has clearly fallen in love with Kazakhstan and he paints a broadly sympathetic picture of a country that has a difficult past, a beautiful but often barren landscape, a climate of hot summers and extreme winters. He presents a country which is relatively tolerant and, with the benefit of oil wealth, is growing prosperous and (by the standards of the region) relatively open. This is more of a travelogue than a deep history or social analysis, but I found it consistently interesting and educational, and often amusing.

I have been interested in Kazakhstan since I spent a summer there almost ten years ago. Borat notwithstanding, most Westerners are unfamiliar with the region: this was the ONLY book about Central Asia among thousands of travel and guidebooks at my local mass-market bookstore. Robbins' writing is a great introduction to Kazakhstan for westerners, as he reviews the country's history and relates amusing anecdotes from his travels. Most western literature on Kazakhstan is dryly academic or political in nature, and focuses on the country's problems and the need for international involvement; this is the first book I've read, that, while acknowledging the challenges, presents a positive view of Kazakhstan's present and future. As E. Salimova points out in her review, the book is filled with western bias, and only an introduction - but it is a positive introduction, and one that I hope will whet western appetites for greater understanding of the region.