Life along the Silk Road

Rating:
Summary: Vivid
Review: For historical dilettantes like me, it's easier to understand a time and place not through a recitation of the places and dates of battles and monarchial successions, but through the lives of people who lived then and there. Traditional histories say who won the battles, but not what life was like between those battles. Here, a qualified academic tries to accomodate people like me, showing Central and Eastern Asisa's history during the heyday of the Silk Road through a series of brief vingettes profiling the lives of various types of people who lived then. The professor's writing is stiff, but her intentions are honorable and her technique is effective. Her depiction of the Silk Road through its denizens drew me in with everyday detail from the period, which placed the greater historical details, like Chinese dynastic changes and which nations gained ascendancy at what time, into a context I could understand. I imagine others, including university students, might benefit from the author's methods.

Rating:
Summary: History As It Should Be Told
Review: Life Along the Silk Road acquaints us with the history of a place remote in time and space through a series of ten biographies of men and women who lived over a thousand years ago, including such characters as a Central Asian Trader, a Dancer who witnesses the most terrible civil war in ancient Chinese history, a Buddhist monk from Kashmir, and a Buddhist fresco painter. The stage is immense--from the capital of the mighty Chinese Tang Dynasty to the fabled city of Samarkand in today's Uzbekistan.
Professor Whitfield weaves these semi-fictionalized accounts together from a series of documents discovered 100 years ago in the Chinese desert town of Dunhuang. The book is filled with small, vivid details of everyday existence which bring the ancient Silk road to life. This is no ordinary history book--if you have any interest in ancient China, Central Asia, or the silk road, this book is essential! The only reason I don't give the book five stars is that Professor Whitfield's writing is a bit wooden.

I would also recommend Edward Schafer's ANCIENT CHINA (Time-Life Books, 1967). Schafer was a master of prose style and every page sparkles with life. His work is the best introduction to Chinese history you'll find. It is out of print, but easily obtainable through Amazon for a few dollars.

Rating:
Summary: a gem with a fault
Review: Susan Whitfield has written a book that I couldn't put down, and that probably has more to do with me than with the book, because I have just returned from a trip tracing the Middle and Southern Silk Roads (1500 photos taken over 6 weeks, 7 slide shows given so far) and am still basking in the historical richness of this area, as well as its infinite links to world history at large. I liked especially the coeval Table of Rulers from the empires of the Franks, Turks, Arabs, Tibetans, and Chinese, and the Eastern Roman Empire. The book is marred by one defect shared by so many others, with the exception of Joseph Needham's magnum opuses on Chinese science and Edward Schafer's Golden Peaches of Samarkand, viz. the omission of a table of Chinese/Turki/Sanskrit proper names of people and places to go with the English spellings. This leaves the savvy reader with the unending task of trying to figure out who or what she is talking about based purely on previous acquaintance. Even so prestigious and recent a publication as the Mummies of Urumqi or the Mummies of the Tarim Basin still suffers from this egregious defect. With her accessibility to historical material, it would be somewhat of a disservice to withhold this information for some trivial (or utilitarian) reason such as making the book more expensive, or lack of proper typeset. The latter might have been an excuse prior to the computer age, but with so many multilingual packages and XML/UML widelyl available, the excuse is rather lame. Both these authors should issue a Web-based Appendix for all interested parties. If they do that, I'd feel comfortable making their books 5 Stars.

Rating:
Summary: Transported in a Time Machine
Review: The period of the Middle and Late Tang, from around 700 to 900, is one of the most facinating eras of Chinese hisotry. In particular the An Lushan rebellion, around 750, brought about a change from an outward looking world culture to a gradually shrinking Chinese view of the world. Few good or lively books have been written about this period. Susan Whitfield has portrayed the period by a reconstruction of the life and times of ten individuals, all of them historical and ranging from a humble monk and soldier to a top salesman and a princess. At some pages, the reader may feel transported by a time machine: one hears the sounds, smells the smells and hears the multilingual crowds in the capital of Chang'an or the various desert posts. One major quality of this book is that it is not written solely from a Chinese point of view, but includes many details of the customs and perceptions of the peoples of Central Asia. The author has clearly digested a wealth of historical data and translated those into a book which one would like to read in one sitting - which is an inhuman undertaking given the sheer joy and shock of all the little anecdotes, background facts and human insights. No previous knowledge of Chinese history is necessary to relish these stories.

Rating:
Summary: Well researched, not as well written
Review: While the characters of this book were very interesting and the research helped to create a deep and rich group of people, I found that there were issues for me with the writing style itself. Whitfeild is a gifted historian and does her homework very well, but there are times when she lapses into cliched and confusing language that alienates me from the characters she has created. For a good history lesson, I recommend it, but for a rewarding read, it falls a little short.

Rating:
Summary: Well researched, not as well written
Review: While the characters of this book were very interesting and the research helped to create a deep and rich group of people, I found that there were issues for me with the writing style itself. Whitfeild is a gifted historian and does her homework very well, but there are times when she lapses into cliched and confusing language that alienates me from the characters she has created. For a good history lesson, I recommend it, but for a rewarding read, it falls a little short.

Rating:
Summary: BRILLIANT SNAPSHOTS OF LIFE IN ANCIENT CHINESE TURKESTAN
Review: WHITFIELD WONDERFULLY CONJURES UP IMAGES OF TRADERS,MONKS,SOLDIERS AND OTHERS,AS THEY LEAD THEIR DAILY LIVES IN THE MOST REMOTE REGIONS OF ASIA. INDEED, HOW MANY HISTORIANS COULD RETRACE An EIGHTH CENTURY BATTLE BETWEEN THE CHINESE AND TIBETANS IN THE REMOTE WAKHAN VALLEY HIGH IN THE AFGHAN PAMIRS.