Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail (Travel Library, Penguin)

This is a very interesting book, about a series of north-Eurasian-corridor lands (China, Mongolia, Russia/Belarus/Ukraine, Poland, and Germany) as they were in 1986, at the dawn of the Gorbachev era but before the breakup of the USSR or the East Bloc could have been seriously envisioned as a realistic possibility. The book also drives home the fact that geographically Asia and Europe are one and the same continent, with all the movement and give-and-take of peoples (and ideas) that basic fact would allow for and imply. The Eurasian continent's southern half is dominated by a series of high mountain chains, but its northern half (through which the author traveled) is for the most part lowland plain, which makes it a natural conveyor-belt of ralatively easy travel between East and West, for invaders as well as for migrants and tourists. Berlin (the author's endpoint) is just east of the point where the southern mountain-chains compress the northern plain to its narrowest width, thus forcing invaders from the east (like the Mongols, whose empire stretched from Korea to the eastern part of pre-war Germany) to slow down, stop and consolidate their advance. Berlin is thus a natural stopping-point, crossroads and focal point for Eurasia, and it should be one of the world's great cosmopolitan cities, with large communities of prople from every country on that Eurasian continuum from Japan/Korea/China to the Netherlands/Belgium/France/Britain. This book hints at that, albeit by contrast with the state of ruin and lost opportunity that prevailed in 1986 three years before the Wall came down and six years before east-west travel was once again truly free.