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Rating: 
Summary: A real winner for all armchair adventurers!
Review: "Alluring Target" is a captivating collection of the exploits of eleven explorers and travelers in Central Asia. Written in the splendid tradition of Peter Hopkirk's "Foreign Devils on the Silk Road," Wimmel's work is even easier to read.No armchair explorer should miss the real-life exploits of these "super-heroes" of Central Asia--both male and female. You may be familiar with one or two of these intrepid adventurers, but some are bound to be new. Action, privation, triumph, discovery, mysticism--and an absolutely bizzare quotation attributed to Winston Churchill--await you. Order this book before it goes out of print!
Rating:
Summary: A real winner for all armchair adventurers!
Review: "Alluring Target" is a captivating collection of the exploits of eleven explorers and travelers in Central Asia. Written in the splendid tradition of Peter Hopkirk's "Foreign Devils on the Silk Road," Wimmel's work is even easier to read. No armchair explorer should miss the real-life exploits of these "super-heroes" of Central Asia--both male and female. You may be familiar with one or two of these intrepid adventurers, but some are bound to be new. Action, privation, triumph, discovery, mysticism--and an absolutely bizzare quotation attributed to Winston Churchill--await you. Order this book before it goes out of print!
Rating: 
Summary: Good starting point
Review: Former foreign service officer Wimmel has written an accessible introduction to eight different "explorations" of Central Asia--which in this book means Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, and parts of China, moreso than current day Uzbekistan, Khazakstan, etc... Wimmel's goal is to remind modern readers of the amazing exploits of intrepid adventurers and scientists of the past, and he wholly succeeds. The book is full of fun little anecdotes and tidbits, as well as excellent photos. My favorite chapter was the description of the Houston Expedition to be the first to fly over Mt. Everest. Good stuff.
Rating:
Summary: This is the book for you. A really good read.
Review: If you are a history buff, outdoor enthusiast, or armchair adventurer, you should read this book. In today's fast paced world we forget that travelling was once a major undertaking, and travel to the unknown points of the globe was an act of risking one's life. These are the true stories of men and women who pushed beyond the conventional and acheived the extraordinary. Kenneth Wimmel has produced a work that is easy to read, and packs a lot of information into 245 pages. I specialize in collecting the books of many of the people mentioned in this work, and never before have I read such easily approachable accounts as Mr. Wimmel has written. I opened the book one sunny afternoon and could not put it down until I was finished. The travels of these explorers gripped the world long before the advent of Television, and they will grip you too! My single brickbat is that such an important work is in paperback.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding overview of early exploration of Central Asia
Review: Overviews of exploration in Central Asia at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, when virtually nothing was known about the region. In the West, anyway. Of particular value are the bibliographies at the end of each chapter, tempting you with hard-to-find books on each of the explorers or expeditions. It is tragic (not to mention expensive) that the books written by the participants are so difficult to come by. It's too bad the book doesn't cover the Haardt-Citroën expedition, something I've been unable to turn up much information on. This book is a real bargain, buy it now while it's still in print!!! I personally couldn't put it down (much to the chagrin of my three year old son, who wanted to do something other than watch me read)! Buy this book! It's a kind of roadmap to a lost world of real life adventure from a far more innocent time when the world was a much larger place.
Rating: 
Summary: Fluff
Review: This book asks no questions, and provides no answers. Instead it provides only summaries of books by explorers, who asked questions and provided answers. The scanty bibliography demonstrates this point. It demonstrates that the author did very little research and only adds so secondary sources authors who did do some homework. If you want good history of explorers and exploration read Hopkirk.
Rating:
Summary: Fluff
Review: This book asks no questions, and provides no answers. Instead it provides only summaries of books by explorers, who asked questions and provided answers. The scanty bibliography demonstrates this point. It demonstrates that the author did very little research and only adds so secondary sources authors who did do some homework. If you want good history of explorers and exploration read Hopkirk.
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