Rating: 
Summary: A Treasure!
Review: "Chasing" is a real treasure, and will prove an excellent reference for future scholars keen to gain insight into Tom Bissell's early years. What was on the young writer's mind when he arrived at the Tashkent airport? When he went to Gulistan, who did he meet? What was Bissell's attitude toward alcohol, foreign languages, the Peace Corps? The answers to these key questions are all here.Surely, as seen in some of the reviews below, Tom Bissell's weltanschauung will not be of interest to everyone. That is hardly the point. You have to ask yourself, where will Bissell's critics be in 15 years time? No doubt still living with their mothers, scribbling away at obscure histories and mocking the society that has rejected them. Meanwhile, Bissell will be sitting pretty--chief fiction editor for The New Yorker perhaps? A sweet gig on the side as a script consultant for a major Hollywood studio? And why is that? What separates Bissell from his mockers? In a word, talent! And while the question of whether Bissell has any or if he is merely well-connected will be debated on web sites, in newspapers, on National Public Radio, and, ultimately, within Academe, his legions of adoring fans will be able to sit back and watch the fur fly. Bissell can take heart in the experiences of past luminaries from New York's literary world. Elizabeth Wurtzel, Susan Sontag and Mary McCarthy all heard plenty of catcalls on their journey to the top, but it didn't stop them. As this far-reaching book shows, Bissell has been to Uzbekistan and he's been to Afghanistan. I'm not sure what that proves, because a lot of other people have probably been there too, but if it proves anything at all, it is this: Tom Bissell will not be stopped by a few sniveling whiners! Yes, "Chasing" has its flaws. As in the lengthy Harper's article which spawned this even lengthier book, readers will hear an echo from Ecocide in the USSR by Murray Feshbach. But as the other Tom of American letters noted: "Good writers borrow. Great writers steal." Bissell in Harper's, April 2002:
No other industrial society so impartially poisoned its land, water, air, and citizens while at the same time so loudly proclaiming its efforts to improve human health and the condition of the natural world. Feshbach page 1:
No other great industrial civilization so systematically and so long poisoned its land, air, water and people. None so loudly proclaiming its efforts to improve public health and protect nature so degraded both. Bissell:
"We cannot expect charity from nature," the Stalinists used to say. "We must tear it from her." Feshbach 43:
Stalinist planning justified itself with a forthright slogan: "We cannot expect charity from nature, we must tear it from her." Harper's:
Where surgeons were forced by supply shortages to perform appendectomies with safety razors rather than scalpels. Feshbach 222:
Ranging beyond Moscow, they could have mentioned the surgeon in a distant part of the Russian Republic who told his colleague, the head doctor of a Moscow hospital, about regularly performing appendectomies with a straight-edge razor, as no scalpels were available. Harper's:
Soviet joke: What would happen if the Soviet army conquered the Sahara Desert? For fifty years, nothing. Then it would run out of sand. Feshbach 56:
Hence the stinging joke Soviets told about the likely results of a Red Army conquest of the Sahara: "For fifty years nothing would happen. After that we would have to import sand." Harper's:
Where factory directors guilty of willfully discharging polluted water into the drinking supply were fined fifty rubles, enough for two packs of imported cigarettes. Feshbach 115:
In the Krasnoyarsk region, bordering Kansk, seventy factory directors were personally assessed during 1990 for discharging polluted water. The fee in each case was a mere fifty rubles, enough to buy two packs of imported cigarettes. Harper's:
Where people were so enthused over humankind's new technological prowess they named their daughters Elektrifikatsiya and their sons Traktor Feshbach 134:
In those early years, some enthusiastic Soviets actually named their daughters Elektrifikatsiya (and their sons Traktor). Harper's:
Soviet joke: Two doctors are examining a patient. One doctor looks at the other. "Well," he says, "what do you think? Should we treat him or let him live?" Feshbach 218:
They came, after all, from the ranks of a profession where the standing joke had doctors examining a patient asking one another: "Well, shall we treat him or shall we let him live?" Harper's:
Whose minister of health in 1989 advised, "To live longer, you must breathe less." Feshbach 260:
For at least several more perilous years, it will be easier to point to the size of the ecological danger than to define the most cost-effective ways to reduce it and to say with a hollow laugh, as the Russian Republic minister of health had in 1989: "To live longer, you must breathe less." Harper's:
The Soviet Union was a country where, in 1990, remembering Nikita Khrushchev's boastful promise to overtake and surpass American standards of living, angry, abused, and exhausted protesters marched past the Kremlin carrying placards that read: "Let us catch up with and surpass Africa." Feshbach 267:
In 1990, however, the crowd carried not Gorbachev's portrait but signs that read: "70 Years on the Road to Nowhere" and in scornful memory of Nikita Khrushchev's boasts about overtaking American standards of living: "Let Us Catch Up with and Surpass Africa."
Rating: 
Summary: Tawdry, Short-Sighted, Touristy Tripe
Review: I saw some hype about this book, and having lived in the region for several years, I figured I'd check the book out. While serving in Central Asia, I had ample opportunity to acquaint myself with the people, the places, and the past times. I dated a few woman, made a few friends and couple enemies too, and I'll tell you this much: Bissell's book was written for some other Central Asia (maybe the type of Central Asia one sees from staring at a laptop too long in a Borders). Bissell's guide makes it seem like he watched Travel TV, bought a couple Lonely Planet Tour Guides, and then stayed in a couple Red Roof Inns in Central Asia. Bissell should join the Army Reserve so he can help defend the peoples' freedoms in Central Asia, and also so that he can embark on a more accurate tour of the country. Let's hope for something better next time, and please, please, please, take it easy with the hype everybody. These books aren't cheap, you know.
Rating:
Summary: The Correction
Review: I have to heartily agree with the reader from Tashkent. The reviewer who says Bissell has a "hoitey-toitey" tourist's view of things and says he has "walked the same paths through Central Asia" as Bissell is obviously talking out of his blowhole. A) There are no hoitey-toitey tourists in Central Asia, and B) even if there were, Bissell isn't one of them. He didn't live with the real people of Central Asia? Dude, does or does not eight months spent living with a family and speaking only Uzbek qualify as living with the people? If not, then what the heck does? I should say I've been through Central Asia myself and also I've met Bissell (for five minutes, at a reading) and was rather taken with him. He seems totally decent and self-effacing and humbled by his experiences abroad. Negative reviews like the few posted here about a book this good-hearted and big-hearted are just . . . weird. Here's a young writer desperately trying to make sense of the world and his place in it . . . isn't this good? Isn't this what people accuse our generation of being unable to do? I predict CTS will, someday, be a kind of bellwhether book for us.
Rating:
Summary: This Book is an Affront To Anyone Who's Ever Been There
Review: Over the past several years, I have walked many of the same paths as Tom Bissell throughout Central Asia. His descriptions are trite, his narrative circumspect, and his observations off target. Bissell saw the world from a hoity-toity tourist's perspective, but he never rolled up his sleeves and lived with the people. Thus his thick, condesending prose, and a hipster, self-referential persona which does a severe injustice to the Truth, as well as to the native peoples. In the book jacket I saw that Bissell had written for McSweeneys--let's hope that in the future the pomo hipsters stay on their little reservation and leave the rest of the world, such as Central Asia, to the realists.
Rating:
Summary: This man has NOTHING to say
Review: There was a very positive review of this book in the Economist, so I bought it - hoping to find either a smart travelogue about an intriguing remote country; an informed review of Uzbekistan's past, with historical trends tied to poignant present-day anecdotes; or a whirlwind adventure story. In short, I hoped for something that could stand up to "Siberian Dawn" - a genuinely fascinating if obscure book that nails all of these things immaculately. Unfortunately, "Chasing the Sea" went 0 for 3 in a big way. To be fair to the author, he admits freely up front that he is not an expert in anything of relevance to the book - not in the region's history, not in its language, nor in irigation science (the ostensible purpose of his trip is to check out the rapidly evaporating Aral Sea). Our appreciation for this disarming candor evaporates like the Aral a hundred pages or so into the book, when we realize that there is no intriguing "HOWEVER!" standing behind this confession. Basically, he has nothing more to say about Uzbekistan than any other bright young Westerner who spent a few weeks checking it out (despite the fact that he sojourned briefly there as a Peace Corp volunteer once upon a time before being evacuated due to a nervous breakdown) - and the joke, really, is on you, dear reader, as you're the one who laid down good money for this vapid, empty book, and you're the one who's lavishing precious time on reading it. Bissell is so at a loss for relevant and unique insights that he subjects us to an absolutely numbing account of each and every conversation that he has and errand that he runs during his brief trip to this vast country (which he personally leaves almost wholly unexplored and unvisited). To give you a sense of the torment this results in he literally - LITERALLY - devotes six pages to the act of gathering up his luggage in baggage claim at the airport on the way in. See - he met this American guy there ... a guy with a FUNNY SOUTHERN ACCENT! And - his bag was TWO HOURS LATE getting onto the carousel!! Thus, we get six pages of turgidly detailed prose that should have been deemed as unpublishable. The other source of filler is Bissell's random recounting of tortuous details from the 3-4 history books that he apparently read about the region. These sections feel kind of like a book report from an excessively verbose, if gifted kid. You get a detailed regurgitation of facts that clearly exist in largely irrefutable form in some standard text about the country, somewhere. But you certainly don't get the sense that this is an expert holding forth on the topic of his expertise (because it's not) - making new, or contrarian insights here that have not been made elsewhere in a large number of dry textbooks (because he's not). Reading Chasing the Sea is like sitting next to a REALLY chatty person on a flight home from abroad who's determined to tell you about every little thing that he did during his three weeks in this neat country that he doesn't know much about. If you hunger for such an experience, then buy this book - or sit in coach on a budget flight home from London or Frankfurt at the end of the summer and ask the ticket agent to seat you next to a particularly narcissistic student heading home to his first job. If you'd like to read a genuinely intriguing book about travel in the former Soviet Union - one written by someone who mastered the relevant language (in this case Russian), who actually knew the country he was traveling in cold, and who actually did have a world class adventure, skip this piece of rubbish & pick up Siberian Dawn by one Jeffrey Taylor. I read it three years ago & still it haunts me. Chasing the Sea haunts me in another, not at all good way.
Rating:
Summary: Well done
Review: I was in Uzbekistan at the same time as the author. I was visiting my son, a peace corp volunteer himself. We met in Tashkent, I think Tom bought me a McUzberger. He was a very nice young man. I had no idea he could write so well. Uzbekistan has a frustrating mix Soviet and Islamic culture. The author's unique perspective and his manner of fleshing out a particular story with a thorough history lesson goes a long way to giving that frustration a palpable feel. On the other hand his writing shows the fascinating side of the country and people. Read the book, then go for a visit, return and read the book again. You won't be disappointed by either.
Rating:
Summary: Poignant and Disturbing!
Review: Tom Bissell's wonderful debut is a fascinating blend of travel narrative, political science and memoir. Unlike many young writers, he's not afraid to reveal his own flaws: as a Peace Corps volunteer in Central Asia Bissell quickly decided that he had "nothing to give these children," and stopped preparing for his classes after two months, "preferring simply to show up." Naturally, this created quite a few spare hours in his schedule, which Bissell used to invent a character named Blackmind. For reasons which remain unclear, he soon preferred Blackmind to his Central Asian hosts, escorting this imaginary friend along the streets of Uzbekistan and joining him for tea. Within seven months he was gone, bound for the cozy confines of New York City's publishing industry. But in a refreshing departure from the drooling sycophancy all too common there, Bissell isn't afraid to tackle the literary lions. He takes a few well-deserved pot shots at the eminent travel writer and philosopher Robert Kaplan, or, via Nabokov, the literary critic Edmund Wilson. Unfortunately, Bissell's aim is not always spot on. On the one hand, he quotes Nabokov in order to mock Mr. Wilson's limited Russian, admitting all the while that he doesn't speak much of the language either. This leads to a few howlers, such as on page 104 where he mixes up the Russian word for identity card, kartochka, with an invention of his own, karotchka. Later on, when his faithful guide abandons him for a few moments, Bissell is forced to quote a Russian mountain climber as saying, "something, something something." To be fair, this is the sort of glib summary that passes for cleverness in contemporary literary circles, but it's not particularly helpful for the general reader. And of course, Russian is a very difficult language to learn (just ask those who've done it: David Remnick, Hedrick Smith, Robert Kaiser, Jeffrey Tayler et al) and quite frankly, there are certainly far more interesting things to do in New York City than memorize vocabulary words. Sadly, his Uzbek is equally error prone, seen on page 148, where he spells the local term for neighborhood organization, mahalla, as Malhallya, as in Valhalla, I suppose. Surely, Bissell's years of experience in the publishing industry must have taught him the value of professional proofreaders. One wonders why he chose not to employ one, but perhaps there were budgetary constraints. Of course, modern readers have grown accustomed to seeing a few small spelling mistakes here and there, but Bissell strains the reader's patience further with his unfortunate habit of providing pretentious, and wholly inaccurate, etymological discourses on the Russian language. Page 148 contains such an embarrassment, where Bissell writes, "And what does vodka mean? Vodka means 'little water.'" This standard cliché is rather off the mark, as Harvard's Edward L. Keenan has pointed out elsewhere: "The real Russian diminutives for water, 'voditsa,' 'vodichka,' bear stresses on the second syllable, indicating their derivation from R. 'voda.' 'Vodka,' by contrast, retains its original, Polish, penultimate stress, indicating its pathway into Russian." Not that this sort of thing matters to the general reader, but if a journalist is going to offer up random etymological derivations, or toss a smattering of Uzbek into his work, he ought to do so accurately. In the end, it's really a question about what sort of level you want to live your life on, and Bissell is clearly fond of the shallow end. He attacks the well-traveled Mr. Kaplan on page 80, mocking the writer's take on Uzbek politics. In his rant Bissell includes some nonsense about Uzbek's not striking him as the sort of people who would prowl the streets in search of an ethnic minority's hide. Who does strike Bissell as the type, one wonders, the Germans? the Turks? the Hutus? the Serbs? the Cambodians? Nonetheless, in the course of a brief sojourn in the tumultuous Ferghana Valley, Bissell touches on the ethnic rioting between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks during the collapse of the Soviet Union that may have left more than a thousand dead. Bissell can't be bothered to look into this (because he is an "adventure journalist" and not a "journalist?"), preferring instead to drink vodka with mountain climbers and pass out copies of a men's magazine for which he writes. Perhaps most disturbing is his "borrowing" of facts and quotes from Ecocide in the USSR by Feshbach and Friendly in the otherwise excellent final chapter on the Aral Sea. He makes no mention of the origin of this material, and the reader is left to assume that Bissell did the research on his own. Far from it. Exactly this sort of thing caused quite a scandal recently at the New York Times, but of course the jeunesse doree of the publishing world operates under a rather different set of rules. In the end, these are mere quibbles, which can easily be corrected in time for the paperback edition. Overall, Chasing the Sea is a welcome addition to any reader's collection of Central Asia chronicles. On the book jacket, the young author notes that he has yet to win any literary awards. That, I suspect, will soon change.
Rating:
Summary: Wow. Just . . . Wow
Review: With this, his first book, Tom Bissell instantly becomes the most commanding nonfiction writer of his generation. The book is that good. Funny, harrowing, emotionally involving, compelling, intelligent. It's got everything. He can go from Gen-X knowingness (e.g., X-Men) to a scholarly meditation on the nature of totalitarianism. It took me a while to realize this Tom Bissell was the same writer as the guy who writes those great, funny, lit-crit pieces for The Believer. Versatility, thy name is Bissell. I hope his fiction is bad, at least.
Rating:
Summary: Congrats on a great book Tom!
Review: I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan during the time covered by this book, but unfortunately never met Tom (my dad did though). This was a fabulous read, I couldn't put it down. You'd be hard pressed to find a book that personal experiences and history so seamlessly. Tom captures what it's like to be in Uzbekistan unlike anyone else. Even if you aren't at all interested in the region, you'll enjoy this one.
Rating:
Summary: Chasing the Sea by Tom Bissell
Review: What a wonderful book. Our daughter Carolyn was a Peace Corps worker in Kyrgystan from 1999-2001 and loved the experience, and my husband and I spent 4 months in Tashkent in 2001 with IESC. We counted it as a great experience and visited Samarkand and Bukhara. Tom described things so well and especially explained the Aral Sea disaster so that anyone can understand it. His use of words and similies are excellent. He has a wide vocabulary. This book is a must for anyone.
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