Product Description

Along the banks of the river once called Oxus lie the heartlands of Central Asia: Uzbekistan and Tajikstan. Catapulted into the news by events in Afghanistan, just across the water, these strategically important, intriguing and beautiful countries remain almost completely unknown to the outside world.

In this book, Monica Whitlock goes far beyond the headlines. Using eyewitness accounts, unpublished letters and firsthand reporting, she enters into the lives of the Central Asians and reveals a dramatic and moving human story unfolding over three generations.

There is Muhammadjan, called 'Hindustani', a diligent seminary student in the holy city of Bukhara until the 1917 revolution tore up the old order. Exiled to Siberia as a shepherd and then conscripted into the Red Army, he survived to become the inspiration for a new generation of clerics. Henrika was one of tens of thousands of Poles who walked and rode through Central Asia on their way to a new life in Iran, where she lives to this day. Then there were the proud Pioneer children who grew up in the certainty that the Soviet Union would last forever, only to find themselves in a new world that they had never imagined. In Central Asia, the extraordinary is commonplace and there is not a family without a remarkable story to tell.

Land Beyond the River is both a chronicle of a century and a clear-eyed, authoritative view of contemporary events.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #822475 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Whitlock, a reporter for the BBC World Service, aspires to write a people's history of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan from 1909 to the present. "There are no accounts in English of Central Asia during the Second World War" reads a terse entry in Whitlock's bibliography, suggesting a problem with this approach: people's histories are difficult to present when a region has little in the way of recorded history. Whitlock is forced to weave in an inordinate amount of textbook-level exposition between her firsthand refugee interviews and excerpts from the unpublished diaries of dissidents, resulting in a book bursting out of its own category. Whitlock's intermittent focus on her close relationship with the inhabitants of these remote mountain valleys tends to make her prose veer toward the romantic, as when she describes how Uzbeks conscripted to patrol the Afghan border in June 1997 "walked back swiftly into the hot, black night, thick with the song of crickets." In the hands of a more gifted writer, such an ambitious approach might have successfully blended the newsworthy and the mundane, but Whitlock's prose is too pedestrian. Her preference is clearly for the "unsentimental lives of survivors," and she escorts us through the diplomatic activities of the elites with apparent reluctance. Although this book is certainly of interest to those with a serious curiosity about the region, more casual readers might wait a few years until this untold story is better told. Illus., maps.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
For as much as it has been in the news recently, Central Asia remains a cultural and geographic mystery to most Westerners. This unbiased and original selection should begin to remedy our ignorance. The river is the Oxus or Jaihun; the land beyond is Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, former Soviet republics and ancient crossroads to the subcontinent. Less a travelogue than a guided history, Whitlock's narrative spans three generations, from 1909 to the present. Its foci are two men whose illustrative lives put faces on trying times: Muhammadjan Rustomov, or "Hindustani," an Uzbek farmer's son and religious scholar, and Sadr-e Zia, a relatively cosmopolitan intellectual and, according to the author, one of the few men of his time who understood the Russian Revolution's effect on his homeland as it was happening. Contrast between the two men reiterates geographic and political differences between mountainous Tajikistan and barren yet populous Uzbekistan; both prove distinct from and yet terminally entwined with their chaotic southern neighbor. A must for anyone wishing to understand Afghanistan today, this selection will also interest Russian history buffs. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A welcome survey....full of luminous facts and interpretations. ...sturdy, moree complete companion to other recent looks at the area." -- Review

"Well informed and highly illuminating." -- ,The Guardian (London),

Customer Reviews

Land Beyond the River - Monica Whitlock
This modern history of Central Asia is a primer for those who's knowledge of the region is scarce. BBC Central Asia correspondent Whitlock prepares the reader for the unfolding and unravelling of soviet central asia with the highlights of the regions 20th century history. Using the letters and verbal reminiscences of local people, from ordinary workers, to mullahs, to local and national leaders, she guides us effortlessly from the early parts of the 20th century through the collapse of the soviet state in 1989 and prepares the reader for the events which follow. Monica Whitlock uses archive material and local resources to conjer a descriptive narrative of the region which won't be bettered for years to come

Compelling story
This is a compelling story well told. Highly recommended for anyone wanting an inside view of current events in Central Asia

An excellent set of interviews
This comprehensive survey of the Mid East/Soviet areas of Central Asia offers the eyewitness perspective of BBC foreign correspondent Whitlock, who offers a history of the 206th century in following two central Asian families through social and political changes in their regions. What evolves is an excellent set of interviews which blends with unpublished letters and diaries from two families to present a personal account of Central Asia's modern politics and society.