The Desert Road to Review

Hey,

So last night I finished up Desert Road to Turkestan by Owen Lattimore. Mr. Lattimore was a strange duck. He was an American who spent most of his life in Asia and was educated in a British private school. In 1926, just after his marriage, he hooked up with a camel caravan heading through Mongolia. A trip of several hundred miles through steppe and desert in the heat of summer and chill of winter at a time when China was racked by civil war and the Soviets were agitating the Mongols against the Chinese. In short, a terrible trip to be taking at any time, but doing it now (and as a foreigner) made it especially tough.

The narrative is a bit uneven. There were almost no maps of the terrain being covered and so Lattimore often has to stop and give "position fixing" digressions which are a little jumbled. There's a map in the back of this edition, but it's not nearly detailed enough (and it's likely that Lattimore got things wrong so it's hard to know how useful it would be). Lattimore was also an accomplished linguist and there are times when he hares off into technical details about the intersection between Chinese and Mongol languages that get a bit rough. Although frankly I've always had trouble with the English spelling of Chinese words -- it's spelled "Tao", but pronounced "Dow" and that sort of thing. So I tended to get a bit glassy eyed on those bits.

However, when it comes to recording and recounting the people and experience of being in a caravan, the book shines. Lattimore is recording a way of life that has existed for centuries but which was quickly coming to a close and he paints a vivid portrait of the process. In my previous post, I posted about his lost monocle and the advice of his camel man, but the book is chock-full of moments like that. Lattimore describes the circumstances under which camel pullers can demand hot tea mixed with mutton fat, how they doctor the animals and each other on the trip, their recent introduction to knitting ("if they ran out of yarn they would reach back to the first camel of the file they were leading, pluck a handful of hair from the neck, and roll it in their palms into the beginning of a length of yarn"), and their dealings with traders, bandits and tax collectors on the road.

Lattimore's sense of adventure and curiosity carry through into his writing and it's like you're sitting around the fire with him listening to him talk. Overall, this is a great book and if you've got a bit of wanderlust, it will really scratch that itch.

later
Tom

The Desert Road to Review

Hey,

So last night I finished up Desert Road to Turkestan by Owen Lattimore. Mr. Lattimore was a strange duck. He was an American who spent most of his life in Asia and was educated in a British private school. In 1926, just after his marriage, he hooked up with a camel caravan heading through Mongolia. A trip of several hundred miles through steppe and desert in the heat of summer and chill of winter at a time when China was racked by civil war and the Soviets were agitating the Mongols against the Chinese. In short, a terrible trip to be taking at any time, but doing it now (and as a foreigner) made it especially tough.

The narrative is a bit uneven. There were almost no maps of the terrain being covered and so Lattimore often has to stop and give "position fixing" digressions which are a little jumbled. There's a map in the back of this edition, but it's not nearly detailed enough (and it's likely that Lattimore got things wrong so it's hard to know how useful it would be). Lattimore was also an accomplished linguist and there are times when he hares off into technical details about the intersection between Chinese and Mongol languages that get a bit rough. Although frankly I've always had trouble with the English spelling of Chinese words -- it's spelled "Tao", but pronounced "Dow" and that sort of thing. So I tended to get a bit glassy eyed on those bits.

However, when it comes to recording and recounting the people and experience of being in a caravan, the book shines. Lattimore is recording a way of life that has existed for centuries but which was quickly coming to a close and he paints a vivid portrait of the process. In my previous post, I posted about his lost monocle and the advice of his camel man, but the book is chock-full of moments like that. Lattimore describes the circumstances under which camel pullers can demand hot tea mixed with mutton fat, how they doctor the animals and each other on the trip, their recent introduction to knitting ("if they ran out of yarn they would reach back to the first camel of the file they were leading, pluck a handful of hair from the neck, and roll it in their palms into the beginning of a length of yarn"), and their dealings with traders, bandits and tax collectors on the road.

Lattimore's sense of adventure and curiosity carry through into his writing and it's like you're sitting around the fire with him listening to him talk. Overall, this is a great book and if you've got a bit of wanderlust, it will really scratch that itch.

later
Tom