Silk Road to Ruin

Author: Ted Rall
Publisher: NBM Publishing
ISBN: 1561638870
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
Part graphic novel travelogue, part tongue-in-cheek travel guide, this collection gathers the adventures of caustic cartoonist Ted Rall in the wild and woolly central Asian countries, a veritable powder keg sitting atop the oil the world will need tomorrow. The book combines articles with comics in chapters that relate Rall’s experiences retracing the legendary Silk Road, from the sublime history of China to the absurdity of the present-day petty dictatorships of the “The ’Stans,” to which the author had the temerity—or perhaps stupidity—to return, including once with a group of listeners on his radio show, on a dare. This always-lively compendium offers readers an exotic adventure, satire, and a fun way to find out more about an often overlooked part of the world that looms in importance with its immense, and immensely coveted, reserves of oil.

Sovietistan

Author: Erika Fatland
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643133799
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 495

Book Description
Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan became free of the Soviet Union in 1991. But though they are new to modern statehood, this is a region rich in ancient history, culture, and landscapes unlike anywhere else in the world. Traveling alone, Erika Fatland is a true adventurer in every sense. In Sovietistan, she takes the reader on a compassionate and insightful journey to explore how their Soviet heritage has influenced these countries, with governments experimenting with both democracy and dictatorships. In Kyrgyzstani villages, she meets victims of the tradition of bride snatching; she visits the huge and desolate nuclear testing ground "Polygon" in Kazakhstan; she meets shrimp gatherers on the banks of the dried out Aral Sea; she travels incognito through Turkmenistan, as it is closed to journalists, and she meets German Mennonites that found paradise on the Kyrgyzstani plains 200 years ago. We learn how ancient customs clash with gas production and witness the underlying conflicts in new countries building their futures in nationalist colors. Once the frontier of the Soviet Union, life follows another pace of time. Amidst the treasures of Samarkand and the brutalist Soviet architecture, Sovietistan is a rare and unforgettable travelogue.

Lands of Lost Borders

Author: Kate Harris
Publisher: Knopf Canada
ISBN: 034581679X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE RBC TAYLOR PRIZE WINNER OF THE EDNA STAEBLER AWARD FOR CREATIVE NON-FICTION "Every day on a bike trip is like the one before--but it is also completely different, or perhaps you are different, woken up in new ways by the mile." As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved--that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and philosopher--had gone extinct. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole earth. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars. To pass the time before she could launch into outer space, Kate set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule, then settled down to study at Oxford and MIT. Eventually the truth dawned on her: an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. And Harris had soared most fully out of bounds right here on Earth, travelling a bygone trading route on her bicycle. So she quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Mel, this time determined to bike it from the beginning to end. Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer before her, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous. Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.

After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests

Author: Ted Rall
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 1429955589
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
An unflinching account—in words and pictures—of America's longest war by our most outspoken graphic journalist Ted Rall traveled deep into Afghanistan—without embedding himself with U.S. soldiers, without insulating himself with flak jackets and armored SUVs—where no one else would go (except, of course, Afghans). He made two long trips: the first in the wake of 9/11, and the next ten years later to see what a decade of U.S. occupation had wrought. On the first trip, he shouted his dispatches into a satellite phone provided by a Los Angeles radio station, attempting to explain that the booming in the background—and sometimes the foreground—were the sounds of an all-out war that no one at home would entirely own up to. Ten years later, the alternative newspapers and radio station that had financed his first trip could no longer afford to send him into harm's way, so he turned to Kickstarter to fund a groundbreaking effort to publish online a real-time blog of graphic journalism (essentially, a nonfiction comic) documenting what was really happening on the ground, filed daily by satellite. The result of this intrepid reporting is After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests—a singular account of one determined journalist's effort to bring the realities of life in twenty-first-century Afghanistan to the world in the best way he knows how: a mix of travelogue, photography, and award-winning comics.

Empires of the Silk Road

Author: Christopher I. Beckwith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400829941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 506

Book Description
An epic account of the rise and fall of the Silk Road empires The first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Empires of the Silk Road represents a fundamental rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of this major world region. Christopher Beckwith describes the rise and fall of the great Central Eurasian empires, including those of the Scythians, Attila the Hun, the Turks and Tibetans, and Genghis Khan and the Mongols. In addition, he explains why the heartland of Central Eurasia led the world economically, scientifically, and artistically for many centuries despite invasions by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Chinese, and others. In retelling the story of the Old World from the perspective of Central Eurasia, Beckwith provides a new understanding of the internal and external dynamics of the Central Eurasian states and shows how their people repeatedly revolutionized Eurasian civilization. Beckwith recounts the Indo-Europeans' migration out of Central Eurasia, their mixture with local peoples, and the resulting development of the Graeco-Roman, Persian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations; he details the basis for the thriving economy of premodern Central Eurasia, the economy's disintegration following the region's partition by the Chinese and Russians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the damaging of Central Eurasian culture by Modernism; and he discusses the significance for world history of the partial reemergence of Central Eurasian nations after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Empires of the Silk Road places Central Eurasia within a world historical framework and demonstrates why the region is central to understanding the history of civilization.

Shadow of the Silk Road

Author: Colin Thubron
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061809624
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
Shadow of the Silk Road records a journey along the greatest land route on earth. Out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran and into Kurdish Turkey, Colin Thubron covers some seven thousand miles in eight months. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and camel, he travels from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic progenitor of the Chinese people, to the ancient port of Antioch—in perhaps the most difficult and ambitious journey he has undertaken in forty years of travel. The Silk Road is a huge network of arteries splitting and converging across the breadth of Asia. To travel it is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions and inventions. But alongside this rich and astonishing past, Shadow of the Silk Road is also about Asia today: a continent of upheaval. One of the trademarks of Colin Thubron's travel writing is the beauty of his prose; another is his gift for talking to people and getting them to talk to him. Shadow of the Silk Road encounters Islamic countries in many forms. It is about changes in China, transformed since the Cultural Revolution. It is about false nationalisms and the world's discontented margins, where the true boundaries are not political borders but the frontiers of tribe, ethnicity, language and religion. It is a magnificent and important account of an ancient world in modern ferment.

China and Eurasian Powers in a Multipolar World Order 2.0

Author: Mher Sahakyan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100084627X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
This book argues that the world order is no longer unipolar, and the war in Ukraine proves this fact. As this study describes and theorizes, it has been transformed into a Multipolar World Order 2.0 stage. This title critically examines Chinese, US, Russian, EU, Indian, and a number of other powers’ cooperation and competition over security, diplomatic, economic and cyberspace issues. Accomplished scholars from various regions of the Eurasian continent consider the impact of the Russo–Ukrainian war, the Sino–Russian strategic partnership, China’s relations with the United States and the European Union, the influence of the Belt and Road Initiative, the expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Eurasian Economic Union, China’s policies in the Middle East, Central Asia, Indo-Asia Pacific, the South Caucasus, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as focus on details of growing contradictions and collaboration in the Eurasian continent over markets, technologies, digital leadership, vaccine distribution, and financial institutions in the Era of Multipolar World Order 2.0. Showing that the US-centred unipolar world order is replaced by Multipolar World Order 2.0 where conflicting powers fight to keep or extend their spheres of influence, this volume is of great interest to decision makers, diplomats, scholars and students of international relations, politics, global governance, Eurasian studies, Chinese studies, cybersecurity, and economics, and for those studying human security, international organizations, and geopolitics.

China's Grand Strategy

Author: Sarwar A. Kashmeri
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440867917
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
In the "Great Game" of the 21st century-gaining leadership and influence in Asia-the United States is rapidly being outflanked by China, which is investing in infrastructure, connectivity, and supply chains on an unprecedented global scale. In this first book to use China's Belt and Road Initiative, previously known as China's New Silk Road, as a point of departure to explain why and how China is about to supersede America with regard to influence in Asia, Sarwar A. Kashmeri argues that the United States has a narrow window of opportunity to find a way to fit into a world in which the rules of the game are increasingly set by China. U.S. opposition to the Belt and Road Initiative is doomed to failure, so America must find creative ways to engage China strategically, and he warns that the window to do so is closing fast. The Belt and Road Initiative is China's ambitious project to connect itself to more than 70 countries in Central Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East through new roads, rails, ports, sea lanes, and air links. This cornerstone of Chinese foreign policy under President Xi Jinping is positioning China at the center of over half of world trade, and the loss of American influence and power could well lead to the end of the postwar liberal world order. Far more than merely an infrastructure investment, the Belt and Road Initiative is a masterful grand strategy to create nothing less than a new world order based on the Chinese model of government and its financial institutions. Yet, as the passing of the baton of world leadership takes place, the United States seems curiously incapable or uninterested in devising a counterstrategy. Even though the United States will no longer have the largest economy in the world, it will still be a powerful and rich country with global alliances.

The Stringer

Author: Ted Rall
Publisher: NBM
ISBN: 1681122731
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
Suffering from budget cuts, layoffs, and a growing suspicion that his search for the truth has become obsolete, veteran war correspondent Mark Scribner is about to throw in the towel on journalism when he discovers that his hard-earned knowledge can save his career and make him wealthy and famous. All he has to do is pivot to social media and, with a few cynical twists, abandon everything he cares about most.

Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

Author: Peter Hopkirk
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192802118
Category : Archaeology
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
The Silk Road, which linked imperial Rome and distant China, was once the greatest thoroughfare on earth. Along it travelled precious cargoes of silk, gold, and ivory, as well as revolutionary new ideas. Its oasis towns blossomed into thriving centres of Buddhist art and learning. In time it began to decline. The traffic slowed, the merchants left, and finally its towns vanished beneath the desert sands to be forgotten for a thousand years. But legends grew up of lost cities filled with treasurees and guarded by demons. In the early years of the 20th century, foreign explorers began to investigate these legends, and very soon an international race began for the art treasures of the Silk Road. Huge wall paintings, sculptures, and priceless manuscripts were carried away, literally by the ton, and are today scattered through the museums of a dozen countries. Peter Hopkirk tells the story of the intrepid men who, at great personal risk, led these long-range archaeological raids, incurring the undying wrath of the Chinese.