First-rate in every regard: to be put alongside such classics on the region as Through Khiva to Golden Samarkand and The...
A literate, elegiac account of travels in the outback of Uzbekistan, tracing the origins and consequences of one of the world’s most devastating ecological disasters.
Debut author Bissell’s wanderings in Central Asia begin in an ancient outpost of civilization: the old stone city of Tashkent, to which the author had first come in the mid-1990s as a Peace Corps volunteer but had abruptly fled in the midst of an odd personal crisis (“My reasons for leaving were emotional and complicated. In other words, I lost my mind”). But, deeply affected by the place and its people, Bissell braved a return to document the death of the Aral Sea, now little more than a salty puddle between two great deserts. What caused its demise is complicated, too, but much can be explained by the Soviet-era reliance on cotton and rice cultivation and on damming every free-flowing river in sight. And the sea is well and truly dead, Bissell writes by way of conclusion: “The sea was not coming back, nothing would improve . . . until, one day, the Aral Sea would be spoken of in the doomed, sepulchral tones of Gomorrah, Pompeii, or one of The Tempest’s ‘still-vexed Bermudas.’ ” But Bissell offers much more than a chronicle of ecocide; he delivers a travelogue as well, with a lively portrait of a part of the world that few Americans (but, oddly enough, planeloads of Germans) come to visit. Along the way, with nods to classical English and Russian literature and to pop culture, he explores the history of a nation now struggling to overcome a legacy of totalitarian rule—and in the bargain delivers a stinging critique of contemporary clash-of-civilizations writer Robert Kaplan’s account of Uzbekistan, marked by “an almost perverse freedom to pinion entire cultures based upon how his morning has gone.”
First-rate in every regard: to be put alongside such classics on the region as Through Khiva to Golden Samarkand and The Road to Oxiana.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-42130-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
A vessel as enchanting as the symbolic and shimmering freight it carries.
A book of trees–both real and imagined–that taps some very deep roots of the human psyche.
Here are a handful of arboreal specimens full of divine wonder and aesthetic pleasure, those for which we have special affinities and that resonate on the atavistic level. They speak of our species’ first homes, of life, of good and evil, of the oracular. Bulgatz (More Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 2000) paws around the earth from which these trees sprouted, discovering allegory, parable and metaphor in the process. He is a playful guide, sometimes speaking as a cherub, sometimes as a scholar discoursing on the cooperative relationship of the plant and animal kingdoms in the “Barnacle Goose Tree” and the “Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.” He introduces readers to the farcical folk of Chelm, into whose hands one day came a miraculous box of oranges (“It was a gift, the paper enclosed said, sent from ‘Harry and David, Fruiterers of the World.’ ”), and to the blessed Shmoo Pear, a tree that adapted perfectly to the Atkins diet. But the laughs are spaced out amongst the author’s deeper exploration of our desire to anthropomorphize trees. Far from a pathetic fallacy, Bulgatz sees within these stories–Philemon and Baucis, the Tree of Liberty, Yggdrasil, the forest-intoxicated Celts, the age of the sacred grove–a profound exercise of the imagination.
A vessel as enchanting as the symbolic and shimmering freight it carries.Pub Date: June 23, 2005
ISBN: 1-4134-8422-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Tales from a high-plains pothole by Janovy (Vermilion Sea, 1991, etc.), a man much smitten with the sound of his brain ticking. Secreted in the Nebraskan countryside is Dunwoody Pond. Its weedy, teeming waters serve as a vibrant life-science laboratory, a primal stew he hopes will enter his students' souls as well as their collecting nets. His students are an estimable bunch: Tami and her damselfly parasites; Bill and his leeches; Rich and his black beetles; Skip and his gill tissue suckers. They all get deeply, sweetly immersed in their creatures. It's Janovy who's the problem. He wants to know what inspires these young naturalists, but he tells us more about himself than about his charges. In the process, Janovy scurries all over the place in a free association that he clearly finds charming; but it comes across as Brownian motion—which is to say, directionless and tedious. Too often he writes, ``And that is the main point of this story, even though we have taken a short diversion.'' He can be painfully smug (asking, for instance, why anyone would choose to be a physical therapist when one could be a parasitologist); he comes out with presumptuous statements that are utter rot (``Every dead soldier's mother is convinced that it is right for her to bear the death of her child in obeyance to a commander-in- chief''); and he strains analogies with the best of them. Enduring the chapter ``Conversations at the Rock'' is as pleasurable as being locked in a closet with a logorrheic methedrine freak. The one time Janovy cuts sharp is in his chapter on cliff swallows—gentle, humorous, insightful, and without a single mention of himself, even obliquely. As a place, Dunwoody Pond may have lit the passions of an undergraduate clutch; as a book, it is a pompous embarrassment of sputters and fizzles.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11456-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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