Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared
10 best books like Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared (Christopher Robbins): The River's Tale: A Year on the Mekong, Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia, A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road, The Lost Heart of Asia, Night Train to Turkistan: Modern Adventures Along China's Ancient Silk Road, Eight Feet in the Andes, Butter Tea at Sunrise: A Year in the Bhutan Himalaya, The 8:55 to Baghdad, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia, Along The Enchanted Way: A Romanian Story
The River's Tale: A Year on the Mekong
| Author | Edward Gargan |
| ISBN | 0375705597 |
Along the Mekong, from northern Tibet to Lijiang, from Luang Prabang to Phnom Penh to Can Lo, I moved from one world to another, among cultural islands often ignorant of each other’s presence. Yet each island, as if built on shifting sands and eroded and reshaped by a universal sea, was re-forming itself,...
In 1996, Tom Bissell went to Uzbekistan as a naive Peace Corps volunteer. Though he lasted only a few months before illness and personal crisis forced him home, Bissell found himself entranced by this remote land. Five years later he returned to explore the shrinking Aral Sea, destroyed by Soviet irrigation...
A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road
| Author | Christopher Aslan Alexander |
| ISBN | 1848311257 |
"Most travelogues chart a journey, but in this case it is the author's decision to stay put that lifts his book out of the ordinary."--"Lonely Planet Magazine"Accompanied by a large parrot, a ginger cat, and his adoptive Uzbek family, Christopher Aslan Alexander recounts the sheer magic of Uzbek culture...
| Author | Colin Thubron |
| ISBN | 0060926562 |
A land of enormous proportions, countless secrets, and incredible history, Central Asia--the heart of the great Mongol empire of Tamerlane, site of the legendary Silk Route and scene of Stalin's cruelest deportations--is a remote and fascinating region. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and...
| Author | Stuart Stevens |
| ISBN | 0871131900 |
"Chop Stuart"
Travellers come in many flavors, just like ice cream. Some try to "get in" with the natives of the places they go in order to learn more about foreign ways and perceptions. Others prefer to challenge themselves with tests of strength and endurance, paddling up jungle rivers or...
| Author | Dervla Murphy |
| ISBN | 0006547974 |
The eight feet belong to Dervla Murphy, her nine-year-old daughter Rachel and Juana, an elegant mule, who together clambered the length of Peru, from Cajamarca on the border with Ecuador, to Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital, over 1300 miles to the south. With only the most basic necessities to sustain...
| Author | Britta Das |
| ISBN | 1840244984 |
Often seen as a magical paradise at the end of the world, Bhutan is inaccessible to most travellers. Set against the dramatic scenery of the Himalaya, this beautiful memoir reveals hardships and happiness in a land almost untouched by the West. When Britta, a young physiotherapist, goes to work in a...
From BBC radio 4 Extra:
"Her adventure had been taken at a moment of major personal change; mine was beginning at a moment that could change the world".
In 1928, crime writer Agatha Christie made a spur-of-the-moment decision to go on holiday, alone, to Iraq. Then in her late thirties she...
Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia
| Author | Ahmed Rashid |
| ISBN | 0142002607 |
Ahmed Rashid, whose masterful account of Afghanistan's Taliban regime became required reading after September 11, turns his legendary skills as an investigative journalist to five adjacent Central Asian Republics-Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan--where...
Along The Enchanted Way: A Romanian Story
| Author | William Blacker |
| ISBN | 0719597900 |
When William Blacker first crossed the snow-bound passes of northern Romania, he stumbled upon an almost medieval world. There, for many years he lived side by side with the country people, a life ruled by the slow cycle of the seasons, far away from the frantic rush of the modern world. In spring as the...
HEARING BIRDS FLY is Louisa Waugh's passionately written account of her time in a remote Mongolian village. Frustrated by the increasingly bland character of the capital city of Ulan Bator, she yearned for the real Mongolia and got the chance when she was summoned by the village head to go to Tsengel...
| Author | Peter Rudiak-Gould |
| ISBN | 1402766645 |
Just one month after his 21st birthday, Peter Rudiak-Gould moved to Ujae, a remote atoll in the Marshall Islands located 70 miles from the nearest telephone, car, store, or tourist, and 2,000 miles from the closest continent. He spent the next year there, living among its 450 inhabitants and teaching...
| Author | Stanley Stewart |
| ISBN | 1592281060 |
Vivid, hilarious, and compelling, this eagerly awaited book takes its place among the travel classics. It is a thrilling tale of adventure, a comic masterpiece, and an evocative portrait of a medieval land marooned in the modern world. Eight and a half centuries ago, under Genghis Khan, the Mongols...
| Author | Claire Scobie |
| ISBN | 1846040051 |
Some go to Tibet seeking inspiration, others for adventure. The award-winning journalist, Claire Scobie, found both when she left her ordinary life in London and went to the Himalayas in search of a rare red lily. Her journey took her to Pemako, where few Westerners have set foot and where the myth of...
The Ringtone and the Drum: Travels in the World's Poorest Countries
| Author | Mark Weston |
| ISBN | 1780995865 |
Laced with danger, packed with novel insights and told with a humane voice, The Ringtone and the Drum relates the fascinating tale of Mark Weston’s travels in West Africa. His journey through Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso touches a dizzying array of subjects, including the consequences...
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay
| Author | John Gimlette |
| ISBN | 1400078520 |
Haven to Nazis, smugglers’ paradise, home to some of the earth’s oddest wildlife and most baroquely awful dictatorships, Paraguay is a nation waiting for the right chronicler. In John Gimlette, at last it has one. With an adventurer’s sang-froid, a historian’s erudition, and a sense of irony...
A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos & Vietnam
It's easy to see why Graham Greene was lured to Vietnam by Lewis's account. The sense of a country -- indeed, an entire region -- on the verge of revolution, beleaguered colonial officials gamely assisting the author in procuring transport from one crumbling outpost to the next, the documentary feel...
Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria
| Author | Kapka Kassabova |
| ISBN | 1846271231 |
Kassabova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and grew up under the drab, muddy, grey mantle of one of communism's most mindlessly authoritarian regimes. Escaping with her family as soon as possible after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, she lived in Britain, New Zealand, and Argentina, and several other places....
Inside Central Asia: A political and cultural history of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Iran
The former Soviet republics of Central Asia comprise a sprawling, politically pivotal, densely populated, and richly cultured area of the world that is nonetheless poorly represented in libraries and mainstream media. Since their political incorporation in Stalin's Soviet era, these countries...
Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall
| Author | Andrew Meier |
| ISBN | 0393326411 |
"A compassionate glimpse into the extremes where the new Russia meets the old," writes Robert Legvold (Foreign Affairs) about Andrew Meier's enthralling new work. Journeying across a resurgent and reputedly free land, Meier has produced a virtuosic mix of nuanced history, lyric travelogue, and...
Apologies to My Censor: The High and Low Adventures of a Foreigner in China
| Author | Mitch Moxley |
| ISBN | 0062124439 |
The story of a young man's outrageous adventures in China and his search for identity in the most unexpected of places.
Mitch Moxley came to Beijing in the spring of 2007 to take a job as a writer and editor for China Daily, the country's only English-language national newspaper. The Chinese...
Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus
| Author | Oliver Bullough |
| ISBN | 1846141419 |
In the afternoon of April 15, 2013, I was listening to the radio. An announcer interrupted the broadcast to report that there had been a blast at the Boston Marathon. He was careful not to attribute the bombing to any one group – because we are all afraid of appearing to stereotype one group as terrorists....
