Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia

Part travelogue, part history, part reportage, part editorial, this is the best book of its kind that I've ever read. It is an un-patronizing portrait of people making the best of difficult circumstances that most of us can't imagine well. One thing that distinguishes "Chasing the Sea" from, say, Colin Thubron's "The lost heart of Asia" is its persistent up-beat tone. Just because the facts are sad doesn't mean that reading about them has to be depressing. Besides, you have to love an author who takes the trouble to place a sub-title at the top of every other page and who, in non-fiction, is so candid about his own weaknesses (e.g. his abortive Peace Corps service, his inability to deliver money to one promised recipient). Miscellany: This book could not have succeeded in its current form if Bissell had not hooked up with Rustam, his young, proud, intelligent, opinionated, endearing translator and advisor. The tension between Bissell's typically Politically Correct American views and Rustam's practical Uzbek views on the country's history, politics, and future (not to mention women) makes a lot of the book work. Yes, early in his book, Bissell gives a description of the Aral Sea situation uncannily similar to that in "Ecoside in the USSR" by Feshbach, et al. (I own that book also). He credits "Ecoside" in his bibliography. I suppose that if this were an academic work, he'd have to have appropriate footnotes, but the important thing is that more people will find out about the eco-problems of Central Asia by reading "Chasing the Sea" than will work their way through Feshbach. Bissell has stones. His taking of Robert D Kaplan, the highly regarded travel writer/Atlantic correspondent, to task is reminiscent of Mark Twain taking Fennimore Cooper to task, except that Fennimore Cooper was not alive when Samuel Clemens published "...literary offenses". I'm not quite sure why, but the middle of the book drags a bit in the sections on Samarkand and Bukhara with some of the discussion of Jenghiz Khan, Tamer-the-lame, and Nasrullah (though I'm glad the material is there), but it picks up again in the chapter on Ferghana and the Tien Shan mountain funeral. The final chapter when Bissell arrives at the former Aral coastline is captivating and heartbreaking (though not depressing to read!). I wish the glossary was larger. The book closes with Bissell's answer to the out of context question, "What is there to do?" My own even further out of context answer is: wait for Tom Bissell to publish another book.

_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 p

What the holy moly is it with this book? A bunch of one-stars, and bunch of five-stars, and not much in between. I have a theory (I just read it). Here's that theory: This is a book that takes its time to do what it does, and it doesn't care to obey the accepted rules of nonfiction. I think Mr. Bissell, the author, very self-consciously tried to write a piece of Literature. I also think he cares more about the writing than the politics or journalysis. And you are either down with that or you're not. You either like the writing or you don't. Plenty of people are turned off by Art and Literature, and here's a tome about a current-eventsy part of the world that has had little recent Art about it. Confusion! (maybe). I happened to really love Chasing the Sea, but what I'm saying is that I sort of see why a certain sort of person wouldn't. I don't think Bissell is a racist or white supremecist, though, as one reviewer does. That's kooky. All Peace Corps volunteers will love it, though, as will fans of Theroux or Matthieson.

Tom Bissell writes with such style and grace, using language with precision and wit, that he could probably tackle any subject and I'd find it fascinating. Here, he manages to write a book that crosses many genres: it is both a travel book and a history, a memoir and a reflective essay, and above all a triumph of narrative. Whether he is describing the beautiful women on the Tashkent subway, the ugly (and noble) Americans doing various kinds of business in Central Asia, the history of the Muslim former Soviet republics, the nuances of the Uzbek language, or, most importantly, what is the most profound ecological change on the planet -- the disappearance of the Aral Sea -- Bissell's prose is clear, sharp, and funny. How he managed to remember tiny details escapes me, but this book transcends its subject matter. I mean, I never thought I'd be interested in Uzbekistan, but once I started reading the author's adventures with his (very funny) translator as they investigate life there, I couldn't put the book down. Details like a laundry detergent named Barf sparkle on every page. It's Gen X ironic in a way but much more profound.