Christian Caryl reviews Colin Thubron's new book, Shadow of the Silk Road, in the most recent New York Review of Books. In it he makes an excellent point on what it takes to travel the Silk Road today:

If you want to travel the modern-day Silk Road and live to tell the tale, then, it's a good idea to be on your guard against certain temptations. You'll need the gift of illuminating the achievements of the route's ancient civilizations even while deflating the myths they so easily encourage. You'll have to digest a huge, intimidating layer cake of history and cultural knowledge that encompasses the religion, economics, and art of long-dead societies as well as the subtleties and quirks of existing ones. You should succumb to the mystique of the artistic and historical fragments that remain while refusing to idealize the world from which they come. If you want to travel the whole way, moreover, you'll need a certain toughness, a bracing insistence on getting the story no matter how adverse the conditions. Command of several of the relevant languages certainly won't hurt. Be sure to stay on your guard, always ready to hold your own against curious customs officials or greedy cops. And above all, resist the urge to dismiss a messy pres-ent in favor of the traces of the past.

Many people have asked me, "why is it taking you four years to write this book?" Or this one: "why are you reading so many different and diverse books, like the Shi Ji or a History of Iran? Or the Shahnameh for crying out loud?" And my favorite: "why do you keep going back?"

Read the above paragraph again and you'll start to understand the extent of the enterprise I've embarked upon.

Tom Bissell wrote a wonderful book about Uzbekistan, one I enjoyed immensely.

He's a skilled storyteller, a natural raconteur. But his book lacked what the above paragraph calls for. Sure, he told the tale of Stoddart and Conolly, but everyone knows that one.

Why stop there when there are so many other examples, anecdotes and stories, more illuminative and fascinating and unsentimental.

As my father once said to me while we were in Shahkrisabz, Uzbekistan, the home of Tamerlame: "It makes you just want to keep going, on to the next destination, over the next mountain range, just keep going." It's a seductive place and only by traveling it do you come to know it.