Get It Now Eastward To Tartary: Travels In The Balkans, The Middle East, And The Caucasus Penned By Robert D. Kaplan Conveyed In Digital Copy

this sordid age of journalistic wickedness when those of that treasured profession have decided against their ancient sacred trust of informing, of shining beautiful white light into the darkened corners of our tired world, sometimes nevertheless you come across a champion.
Like a knight in shining armor, following an olden code driven onward by honor and dutybound to carry out his chosen burden in good faith holding his cherished joy in an open hand lest he should clutch it in rage and impunity and destroy it, for it is delicate and fragile, he seeks to tell a story.
A minstrel a griot a bard,

I find Robert Kaplans writing to be like this, He is a journalist from a bygone era, full of curiosity and compassion and insight when nowadays all we have is shallow hubris and hate propping up the sad enraged opinions of the uninformed informers.
His works are long as long as the journeys he undergoes to attempt to get to the heart of the issue, to understand it in order to then explain it to those of us who cannot take the time necessary to understand it ourselves.
He journeys by bus, not the first class tickets and executive lounges that have become the norm these days by those who nevertheless wish to be our guides.
He traverses countries through lost landborders, like the powerless are forced to, He stays in the ratty hotels of provincial capitals because it is there where the merchants and miscreants stay, those who govern the world away from the shiny buildings in the capital wherein rest the television studios with their painted pundits.
He does the hard work, for those of us who would love to but cannot find the time the months and months of travel and the dozens of painstaking interviews that the job demands, the compost from which grows understanding.


I picked up a copy of “Eastward to Tartary” while I was on a quick vacation in Dubai with my family, My little boy was searching out a copy of “Dog Man” of which I will not be writing a review though I was immensely pleased to go into a bookstore for my tiny lad to hunt down a book though the mark was something less than literature, Ill take it! and I took the opportunity for myself.
I was actually looking for “Revenge of Geography” but that will have to wait, for “Eastward” is about the Caucuses and Balkans and Syria and Turkey written twenty years ago at a time of great flux and turmoil a turmoil which, ironically or perhaps not, has only gotten worse.


I have been spending significant time myself in the Caucuses recently though without the opportunity and platform to turn my own wanderings into anything, at least not yet.
And I wanted to read what Kaplan had to say about the place, I was not to be disappointed in true Kaplan fashion he outlines amile trek through the southeastern edges of Europe going farther and farther from Europe and Turkey to end up in the bizarre backwater of Turkmenistan.
There are so many places, far at the edge of empire yet with a resonance all their own that echo with a past of greatness and significance though today the names no longer fall freely from the lips of merchants and mercenaries and diplomats.
Places we should nevertheless consider,

What I always take from Kaplans writing and “Eastward” was no different is the cyclical nature of history of how places rise and fall and often rise again, usually in a different form, but returning to our imaginations after long at the inverse of epicenter.
Places like Damascus like Jaffa like Jerusalem and Baku Moscow, which always sees itself as one of the great guardians of Europe after Rome and Istanbul.
Places which endure and stories we must know if we are to divine what will happen in the future, and from whence we came, Modern journalists could take a page from the book of Kaplans life: rediscovering their curiosity they could deny the sirens call of arrogance and moderate themselves, perhaps even finding wisdom through so great a study which always always reminds us of how little we actually know about what we think we can control.


A quick aside the one thing I did not like about “Eastward” was the perfunctory or perhaps postscript nature of Kaplans section on Armenia.
Written as an epilogue, and focusing mostly on the genocide and the war with Azerbaijan, he does not do justice to the epicat least year story of Armenia especially given the amazing fact that in each other section of the book from great places such as Istanbul and Aleppo and Jerusalem to the lost ones like Ashkabat on the far side of the silent Caspian Sea he describes the presence of Armenians and their impact on areas far from their gentle valley under their ancient mountain.


Maybe in his next book! This book is heavy going, It is positively crammed with observations, names, places, and history one can hardly absorb in one pass, I have followed Robert Kaplan for years, and once again I am floored by his audacity, no, make that bravery, to travel in these parts of the world where so few of us can or would go, especially as a lone traveler, especially as an American/Israeli Jew.


And not to mention, once again, something that I always wonder about: how much research goes into writing such a book that covers so much territory, people, and time Well, it can be discerned from bibliographies and/or footnotes where the details come from.
And in this book, like his others, the appendices are impressive, and humbling, I feel like I will have to return to this book several times to better cement more facts and to organize my thoughts about what I have learned.


I have some background in the study of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, even a touch of the Middle East, but of Central Asia that is, the old Victorian Tartary, no.
I approach this one as a total ignoramus, and therein lies the fascination for the learner, Kaplan starts in Hungary visiting his host, who suggests they should start drinking red wine atam, as it will ", . . loosen our tongues. " Hahaha, got to love that guy! Then Kaplan travels down through Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel before he heads in the direction of "Tartary," that is, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, on the far side of the newly oilrich Caspian Sea, and all the tribal subsections thereof, before reversing to Armenia.


It is clear from history this geography was the center of important ancient civilizations, which have been lost or outshined by the development of western Europe.
The Central Asia region was always complex, but then it was thoroughly contaminated by imported cultures from Soviet Russia, At the collapse of the Soviet, the area was left even more confused, competitive, and dysfunctional,

Since this book was written after the fall of the Soviet Union, and after he had visited the same area earlier, we a get a comparison about the conditions before and after the Soviets, and it counterintuitively it appears that the Soviet era was better for many of these countries, considering the state disintegration and power vacuums that followed.


The details of the mostly desolate geography and the ramshackle towns are repetitive and depressing, but we begin to see the stirrings of the Caspian Sea area oil development and wonder how the river of money coming at them will change these ancient and nomadic cultures of Tartary.


One important lesson learned from Kaplan's investigations in Central Asia following the Soviet collapse is how countries get from state dictatorship to anarchy to strongmen to tribalism.
Can they get to democracy with any of sort mature bureaucracy to keep order The answer is, they usually don't, because from the state of dictatorial empire they collapse into a power vacuum where any sort of governmental institutions are absent and the dictatorship becomes just about a strongman.
State assets are sold off at cheap prices and distributed to oligarchs, and personality cults arise, Then it becomes ever man for himself, and a retreat into clans and tribes for survival, This was Tartary at the time this book was written, Balkan Ghosts is one of the best books I've read in the last few years, It has a great anecdotal style, spinning gripping tales of a bloody and tumultuous history, spanning centuries, Eastward to Tartary is labelled as a sequel to that book, so I was expecting a continuation of sorts, Unfortunately, It takes a very different approach, and ends up reading like an extended article in The Economist or what I imagine The Economist reads like, a vague cross section of prime ministers and the political climate from Romania to Turkmenistan circa.
As such it comes across dated and dull,

Disappointing. It's just fun to say "Tartary, " Eastward to Tartary, Robert Kaplan's first book to focus on a single region since his bestselling Balkan Ghosts, introduces readers to an explosive and littleknown part of the world destined to become a tinderbox of the future.


Kaplan takes us on a spellbinding journey into the heart of a volatile region, stretching from Hungary and Romania to the far shores of the oilrich Caspian Sea.
Through dramatic stories of unforgettable characters, Kaplan illuminates the tragic history of this unstable area that he describes as the new fault line between East and West.
He ventures from Turkey, Syria, and Israel to the turbulent countries of the Caucasus, from the newly rich city of Baku to the deserts of Turkmenistan and the killing fields of Armenia.
The result is must reading for anyone concerned about the state of our world in the decades to come, .