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BACK TO BOKHARA by Fitzroy Maclean

BACK TO BOKHARA

By

Publisher: Harper

The author is in the best tradition of British travel writers -- intelligent, sophisticated and witty. Having spent several years in the U.S.S.R. during the late thirties, his impressions of the nation twenty years later form the basis of this volume. The first half is devoted to Moscow and its environs: the standard of living has improved and the people are far friendlier than during the Stalin regime. The second half is divided between a visit to Turkestan (Tashkent, Samarkand, Bokhara- locale of his best known Escape to Adventure -1950) and a trip to Tiflis in Georgia. No extraordinary adventures befall this Russian-speaking traveller, but he is a good writer who makes the cities of Soviet Asia he visited seem somewhat less remote. He concludes with the ""slender hope"" that the Soviet regime will evolve into ""something easier to live with"". A pleasant, personal book with quite a few interesting photographs, but neither essential nor comprehensive.