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In 1996, Tom Bissell went to Uzbekistan as a na•ve Peace Corps volunteer. Though he lasted only a few months before illness and personal crisis forced him home, Bissell found himself entranced by this remote land. Five years later he returned to explore the shrinking Aral Sea, destroyed by Soviet irrigation policies. Joining up with an exuberant translator named Rustam, Bissell slips more than once through the clutches of the Uzbek police as he makes his often wild way to the devastated sea.
In Chasing the Sea, Bissell combines the story of his travels with a beguiling chronicle of Uzbekistan’s striking culture and long history of violent subjugation by despots from Jenghiz Khan to Joseph Stalin. Alternately amusing and sobering, this is a gripping portrait of a fascinating place, and the debut of a singularly gifted young writer.
- Sales Rank: #1334609 in Books
- Brand: Bissell, Tom
- Published on: 2004-10-12
- Released on: 2004-10-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .90" w x 5.30" l, .69 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 416 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Bissell's first journey to the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996 was cut short by heartache and illness. Memories of that failure dog his return in 2001 to write about the rapidly deteriorating ecosystem of the Aral Sea. Once the size of Lake Michigan, the sea has already lost most of its water and will likely disappear by the middle of the next decade, leaving thousands of square kilometers of salty desert. Journalist Bissell examines that story, but also ponders broader questions about Uzbekistan and its people. Hooking up with Rustam, a young interpreter, he sets off on a road trip across the country. The format of the ensuing travelogue-cum-history lesson resembles that of itinerant political commentators like Robert Kaplan, right down to the repulsively exotic cuisine (e.g., boiled lamb's head) and digressionary mini-essays on the history of European imperialism in Central Asia. But Bissell rails against the way other authors "pinion entire cultures based upon how [their] morning has gone," aiming for a more accurate and balanced portrayal. An ongoing dialogue with Rustam over the region's history and culture, and the extent to which both were shaped by the Soviets, adds a personal dimension. The account doesn't flinch from portraying the region's corruption-crooked cops appear regularly on the scene-but despite the frequent bouts of despair, for both the region and himself, Bissell refuses to give up on the Uzbeks entirely. The humor and poignancy in this blend of memoir, reportage and history mark the author as a front-runner in the next generation of travel writers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From The New Yorker
The title of this erratic but enthralling travelogue refers to the attempts of fishermen in Central Asia to pursue the receding waters of the Aral Sea, which has shrunk, since 1960, to less than a third of its original size. In 2001, the author, a self-described "adventure journalist" and failed Peace Corps volunteer, arrives in Uzbekistan to investigate this ecological disaster. Bissell doesn't so much chase the sea as meander toward it, and nine-tenths of the book concerns his detours—to Samarkand, Bukhara, and the guerrilla-infested mountains of Kyrgyzstan—and his run-ins with suspicious local police forces. Bissell shines as a raconteur, if not as an analyst, and his ebullient narrative harks back to the travel classics of the nineteenth century, when the journey was an end in itself.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
From Booklist
The Central Asian country focused on here is Uzbekistan. In the mid-1990s, Bissell was a Peace Corps volunteer there, and in 2001 he returned, his aim to examine the destruction of the Aral Sea, whose rivers were diverted and drained to fertilize the desert to grow cotton. This ecological catastrophe left the former seabed's soil ruined and vegetation obliterated. Two dozen species of fish native to the Aral Sea were wiped out and the migration of millions of birds ceased. Traveling with Bissell was Rustam, who was half Uzbek and half Tajik and who served as the author's guide and translator. Bissell describes this alien land and its people while offering a history of the country and its culture; he also writes of his confrontations with the Uzbek police. This is more than just a travel book; the author's ingenious and sometimes humorous writing makes it a special read. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
25 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Top-Rank Modern Travel Writing
By A. Ross
I came to this book as someone who enjoys a good travelogue and has a long-standing general interest in Central Asia (I've read all the Hopkirk books). I have to say that despite Bissell's cautionary notice at the beginning that he is not attempting history or reportage or travel writing, but that the book is "a personal, idiosyncratic account of a place and a people and the problems and conflicts they share," this is one of the best modern travelogues I've encountered. Like all the best in the genre, it is outstanding precisely because it is such a personal work. Those interested in just the logistics of getting around and seeing the sights of Uzbekistan can always just pick up a good guidebook or three, and those interested in pure history have plenty of works to pick from. What Bissell brings is sparkling prose and a refreshingly open-hearted approach that admits his own limitations.
Bissell's relationship with Uzbekistan began with an ignominious Peace Corps stint in the 1996, which saw him leaving after less than a year due to a mental breakdown. He returned in 2001, ostensibly to research and write an article about the decline of the Aral Sea, but in a large part, to confront his demons from that earlier experience. As the title foreshadows, he spends most of his trip bouncing around the country in an attempt to come to grips with it (indeed, it isn't until the final 50 pages that he gets to the Aral and discusses its plight). Bissell isn't on any particular itinerary so much as he wants to see the high points and take care of a few tasks (like smuggling money to someone). Because his Uzbek is shaky and his Russian is almost non-existent, he hires a 20-something Uzbek translator named Rustam. This college student peppers his speech with "dude" and "bro", and is a Depeche Mode devotee, not to mention a bit of a ladies man. More importantly, he provides a forum for Bissell to bounce his impressions of the country, its Soviet legacy, and Islam, off of -- and their disagreements are often highly illuminating.
Bissell travels around, from Tashkent to Gulistan, to Samarkand, the Ferghana valley, the T'ien Shan Mountains, and finally to Nukus and the Aral Sea. Modes of travel vary from local bus to hired car to Uzbek Air, and he experiences all the grime and discomfort such travel involves, including a harrowing encounter with some militia who stop their hired car, rather casually club the driver to the ground, take Rustam away for a full body search, and menace Bissell. Contrary to several reviews on Amazon, the most laughable of which reads that he "keeps the indigenous people of Central Asia at arms-length" Bissell interacts heavily with the people and places he visits. Upon arrival in a new place, the first thing he usually does is head out for an aimless hour-long walk to try and get a sense of the place.
Interspersed with his travels, Bissell recounts the political, cultural, and religious history of the country and the region. This ranges all over the place, from linguistics, to British and Russian Imperial history, ethnography, political economy, folk tales, internal Soviet politics, modern corruption, and all manner of things besides. These are generally largely cribbed summaries from other sources (listed in the bibliography), but Bissell does a nice job of putting it altogether in highly readable prose lightly sprinkled with jokes, asides, and personal commentary. Some might find this approach too freeform or meandering, but Bissell makes it work. It all wraps up with the sad tale of Karakalpak people, who used to fish and live off the Aral Sea and now live over 100 miles from its shore, and Bissell is left contemplating the rusting hulks of fishing vessels adrift in an ocean of sand. A brilliant piece of non-fiction from a very talented writer.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
The best book of its kind that I've ever read
By William J. Feuer
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.
26 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
Great overview of Uzbekistan and the Aral Sea's demise
By Tim F. Martin
_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 poor and unhealthy, as their industries - fishing, canning, and shipbuilding - have vanished and they suffer soaring rates of infant mortality, tuberculosis, and other diseases directly and indirectly related to the vanished desert sea.
I don't however want to give the impression that this is a grim book, as there are many funny sections in it and Bissell is a talented writer. Nor is the Aral Sea the only subject covered. It is not even the main subject of this travel essay. Most of the book is devoted to Bissell's travels, most of them with a young Uzbek named Rustam, hired as a translator but becoming a friend as he journeyed throughout Uzbekistan, from the T'ien Shan Mountains and Ferghana Valley in the far east of the nation through Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara. Along the way the author relates many interest aspects of Uzbek history and culture, including the days of the Mongols, Timur (known in the West as Tamerlane), the Samanid dynasty of 819-1005 (during which time Uzbekistan became a center of Islamic learning, producing the great doctor ibn Sina, known to Westerners as Avicenna, revered in the West as late as 1700s, and al-Khorezmi, from whose name the word algorithm is derived), the Great Game (the 19th century Cold War of sorts between Russia and the British for supremacy in Central Asia), and the rule of Islam Karimov.
I found his portraits of the various cities the most interesting aspect of the book. Tashkent for example we learn is not only the most populous city in Uzbekistan but the most populous in Central Asia. It is also one of the most modern seeming Central Asian cities, as there is very little architecture older than about 50 years (owing partly to the fact that the city has been Russified since the late 19th century and partly due to a massive 1966 earthquake). Despite is appearances though this oasis city (its name means "Stone City") is over 2000 years old, making it one of the oldest extant cities in the world. For much of its history it was a "sporadically independent city-state" surrounded by a famous high stone wall sixteen miles long (now completely gone) and controlled at times by such various groups as the Arabs, Chinese, Mongols, and the Kazakhs.
Bissell also has many asides in the book about Uzbek culture. He wrote of the very nature of Uzbek, an agreed-upon identity that is less than a century old; that in 1902 a Russian ethnographer noted that there were more 80 clan names in Uzbekistan, more important to them than any "Uzbek" identity. Indeed, Uzbek history in any form only stretches back to the 14th century, when a fierce group of nomadic invaders came down from the plains of southern Siberia.
A good book, just wish it had pictures.
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