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 policies. Joining up with an exuberant translator named Rustam, Bissell slips more than once through the clutches of the Uzbek police as he makes his often wild way to the devastated sea.

In Chasing the Sea, " "Bissell combines the story of his travels with a beguiling chronicle of Uzbekistan’s striking culture and long history of violent subjugation by despots from Jenghiz Khan to Joseph Stalin. Alternately amusing and sobering, this is a gripping portrait of a fascinating place, and the debut of a singularly gifted young writer.

Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia

"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 alongside his efforts to rediscover the lost arts of traditional carpet making and establish a self-sufficient carpet workshop offering employment to local women and disabled people.Christopher Aslan Alexander was born in Turkey and grew up in war-torn Beirut. He now lives in the Pamir Mountains.

A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road

Bound by sand and snow, fed by meltwater from the Roof of the World, the fertile oases across Uzbekistan attracted the greatest travellers and conquerors in history along the fragile threads of the Silk Road. Central to this ancient trade route, the turqu

Uzbekistan: The Golden Road To Samarkand

Winner of the Association of Women in Slavic Studies Heldt Prize

Winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society History and Humanities Book Award

Honorable mention for the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize Book Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS)

This groundbreaking work in women's history explores the lives of Uzbek women, in their own voices and words, before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Drawing upon their oral histories and writings, Marianne Kamp reexamines the Soviet Hujum, the 1927 campaign in Soviet Central Asia to encourage mass unveiling as a path to social and intellectual "liberation." This engaging examination of changing Uzbek ideas about women in the early twentieth century reveals the complexities of a volatile time: why some Uzbek women chose to unveil, why many were forcibly unveiled, why a campaign for unveiling triggered massive violence against women, and how the national memory of this pivotal event remains contested today.

The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling Under Communism

Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan became free of the Soviet Union in 1991. But though they are new to modern statehood, this is a region rich in ancient history, culture, and landscapes unlike anywhere else in the world.


Traveling alone, Erika Fatland is a true adventurer in every sense. In "Sovietistan", she takes the reader on a compassionate and insightful journey to explore how their Soviet heritage has influenced these countries, with governments experimenting with both democracy and dictatorships.


In Kyrgyzstani villages, she meets victims of the tradition of bride snatching; she visits the huge and desolate Polygon in Kazakhstan where the Soviet Union tested explosions of nuclear bombs; she meets shrimp gatherers on the banks of the dried out Aral Sea; she witnesses the fall of a dictator.


She travels incognito through Turkmenistan, a country that is closed to journalists. She meets exhausted human rights activists in Kazakhstan, survivors from the massacre in Osh in 2010, and German Mennonites that found paradise on the Kyrgyzstani plains 200 years ago. We learn how ancient customs clash with gas production and witness the underlying conflicts between ethnic Russians and the majority in a country that is slowly building its future in nationalist colors.


Once the frontier of the Soviet Union, life follows another pace of time. Amidst the treasures of Samarkand and the brutalist Soviet architecture, "Sovietistan" is a rare and unforgettable adventure.

Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan

Laura L. Adams offers unique insight into nation building in Central Asia during the post-Soviet era through an exploration of Uzbekistan’s production of national culture in the 1990s. As she explains, after independence the Uzbek government maintained a monopoly over ideology, exploiting the remaining Soviet institutional and cultural legacies. The state expressed national identity through tightly controlled mass spectacles, including theatrical and musical performances. Adams focuses on these events, particularly the massive outdoor concerts the government staged on the two biggest national holidays, Navro’z, the spring equinox celebration, and Independence Day. Her analysis of the content, form, and production of these ceremonies shows how Uzbekistan’s cultural and political elites engaged in a highly directed, largely successful program of nation building through culture. Adams draws on her observations and interviews conducted with artists, intellectuals, and bureaucrats involved in the production of Uzbekistan’s national culture. These elites used globalized cultural forms such as Olympics-style spectacle to showcase local, national, and international aspects of official culture. While these state-sponsored extravaganzas were intended to be displays of Uzbekistan’s ethnic and civic national identity, Adams found that cultural renewal in the decade after Uzbekistan’s independence was not so much a rejection of Soviet power as it was a re-appropriation of Soviet methods of control and ideas about culture. The public sphere became more restricted than it had been in Soviet times, even as Soviet-era ideas about ethnic and national identity paved the way for Uzbekistan to join a more open global community.

The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan

When Craig Murray arrived in Uzbekistan to take up his post in 2002, he was a young ambassador with a brilliant career and a taste for whisky and women. But after hearing accounts of dissident prisoners being boiled to death and innocent people being raped and murdered by agents of the state, he started to question both his role and that of his country in so-called 'democratising' states.

Following his discovery that the British government was accepting information obtained under torture, Murray could no longer maintain a diplomatic silence. When he voiced his outrage, Washington and 10 Downing Street decided he had to go. But Uzbekistan had changed the high-living diplomat and there was no way he was going to go quietly. In this candid and at times shocking memoir, Murray lays bare the dark and dirty underside of the War on Terror.

Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador's Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror

In "Making Uzbekistan", Adeeb Khalid chronicles the tumultuous history of Central Asia in the age of the Russian revolution. Traumatic upheavals--war, economic collapse, famine--transformed local society and brought new groups to positions of power and authority in Central Asia, just as the new revolutionary state began to create new institutions that redefined the nature of power in the region. This was also a time of hope and ambition in which local actors seized upon the opportunity presented by the revolution to reshape their society. As the intertwined passions of nation and revolution reconfigured the imaginations of Central Asia's intellectuals, the region was remade into national republics, of which Uzbekistan was of central importance.

Making use of archival sources from Uzbekistan and Russia as well as the Uzbek- and Tajik-language press and belles lettres of the period, Khalid provides the first coherent account of the political history of the 1920s in Uzbekistan. He explores the complex interaction between Uzbek intellectuals, local Bolsheviks, and Moscow to sketch out the flux of the situation in early-Soviet Central Asia. His focus on the Uzbek intelligentsia allows him to recast our understanding of Soviet nationalities policies. Uzbekistan, he argues, was not a creation of Soviet policies, but a project of the Muslim intelligentsia that emerged in the Soviet context through the interstices of the complex politics of the period. The energies unleashed by the revolution also made possible the golden age of modern culture, as authors experimented with new literary forms and the modern Uzbek language took shape. "Making Uzbekistan" introduces key texts from this period and argues that what the decade witnessed was nothing short of a cultural revolution.

Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR

Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop here reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls. This campaign against the veil was, in Northrop's view, emblematic of the larger Soviet attempt to bring the proletarian revolution to Muslim Central Asia, a region Bolsheviks saw as primitive and backward. The Soviets focused on women and the family in an effort to forge a new, liberated social order.This unveiling campaign, however, took place in the context of a half-century of Russian colonization and the long-standing suspicion of rural Muslim peasants toward an urban, colonial state. Widespread resistance to the idea of unveiling quickly appeared and developed into a broader anti-Soviet animosity among Uzbeks of both sexes. Over the next quarter-century a bitter and often violent confrontation ensued, with battles being waged over indigenous practices of veiling and seclusion.New local and national identities coalesced around these very practices that had been placed under attack. Veils became powerful anticolonial symbols for the Uzbek nation as well as important markers of Muslim propriety. Bolshevik leaders, who had seen this campaign as an excellent way to enlist allies while proving their own European credentials as enlightened reformers, thus inadvertently strengthened the seclusion of Uzbek women--precisely the reverse of what they set out to do. Northrop's fascinating and evocative book shows both the fluidity of Central Asian cultural practices and the real limits that existed on Stalinist authority, even during the ostensibly totalitarian 1930s.

Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia

While draught and desertification are intensifying around the world, corporations are aggressively converting free-flowing water into bottled profits. The water wars of the twenty-first century may match—or even surpass—the oil wars of the twentieth. In "Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit, "Vandana Shiva, "the world's most prominent radical scientist" (the Guardian), shines a light on activists who are fighting corporate maneuvers to convert this life-sustaining resource into more gold for the elites.

In "Water Wars, "Shiva uses her remarkable knowledge of science and society to" "outline the emergence of corporate culture and the historical erosion of communal water rights. Using the international water trade and industrial activities such as damming, mining, and aquafarming as her lens, Shiva exposes the destruction of the earth and the disenfranchisement of the world's poor as they are stripped of rights to a precious common good.

In her passionate, feminist style, Shiva celebrates the spiritual and traditional role water has played in communities throughout history, and warns that water privatization threatens cultures and livelihoods worldwide. Shiva calls for a movement to preserve water access for all, and offers a blueprint for global resistance based on examples of successful campaigns.

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and recipient of the 1993 Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award). She is author of several books, including "Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply" (South End Press, 2000); "Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge" (South End Press, 1997); and "Staying Alive" (St. Martin's Press, 1989). Shiva is a leader, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin, in the International Forum on Globalization. Before becoming an activist, Shiva was one of India's leading physicists.

Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit

In this much-loved children's classic first published in 1906, the comfortable lives of three well-mannered siblings are greatly altered when, one evening, two men arrive at the house and take their father away. With the family's fortunes considerably reduced in his absence, the children and their mother are forced to live in a simple country cottage near a railway station. There the young trio—Roberta, Peter, and young Phyllis—befriend the porter and station master.

The youngsters' days are filled with adventure and excitement, including their successful attempt to avert a horrible train disaster; but the mysterious disappearance of their father continues to haunt them.

The solution to that painful puzzle and many other details and events of the children's lives come to vivid life in this perennial favorite, a story that has captivated generations of readers and, more recently, delighted television and movie audiences. In this inexpensive, unabridged edition, it will charm a whole new audience of young readers with its warmth and appeal.

The Railway Children

Land Beyond the River: The Untold Story of Central Asia

Uzbekistan is a country of contradictions. Where legality meets torture and Islam meets a secular state, Uzbekistan is torn between its historical roots, Soviet rule, and modern consumerism. As a vital ally in the ‘War on Terror’, yet retaining a deeply troubling record on human rights, even the West is uncertain about how to approach it.
 
 In this vibrant account, respected journalist Robert Rand draws on three years living and travelling in the region to carefully deconstruct the cultural allegiances and tensions that color Uzbek life. From the heritage of the country’s beloved hero, Tamerlane, to the clash of cultures in Uzbek pop music, this lively book will captivate the historian, the traveller, and anyone who wishes to understand modern life in the ex-Soviet bloc.

Tamerlane's Children: Dispatches from Contemporary Uzbekistan

Beyond The Oxus: The Central Asians

In this study of the modern Uzbeks, Professor Edward A. Allworth provides a comprehensive and authoritative survey of an important group of Muslim people who live within the boundaries of the Soviet Union. After the Russians and the Ukranians, the Uzbeks are the largest ethnic group in the Soviet Union and the strongest of a number of Muslim communities that populate the vast region of Central Asia.

Although he concentrates especially on the imperial Russian and Soviet periods of history, the author also gives earlier periods of Uzbek history solid scholarly assessment. Meticulously analyzed are Uzbek relations with their foreign rulers, the Uzbek response to Russification and modernization, and the ethnic and religious issues in Uzbek society.

Also included is a critique of Soviet historiography and the underlying philosophical and ideological commitments that have shaped the study of history in the Soviet Union. Invaluable to scholars is the survey and assessment of Uzbek documents in Turkish, European, and American depositories.

The Modern Uzbeks: From the 14th Century to the Present : A Cultural History

As a young reporter in Uzbekistan, Bagila Bukharbayeva was a witness to her countrys search for an identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While self-proclaimed religious leaders argued about what was the true Islam, Bukharbayeva shows how some of the neighborhood boys became religious, then devout, and then a threat to the country's authoritarian government. "The Vanishing Generation" provides an unparalleled look into what life is like in a religious sect, the experience of people who live for months and even years in hiding, and the fabricated evidence, torture, and kidnappings that characterize an authoritarian government. In doing so, she provides a rare and unforgettable story of what life is like today inside the secretive and tightly controlled country of Uzbekistan. Balancing intimate memories of playmates and neighborhood crushes with harrowing stories of extremism and authoritarianism, Bukharbayeva gives a voice to victims whose stories would never otherwise be heard.

The Vanishing Generation: Faith and Uprising in Modern Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan more than any other country in the area is likely to play a critical role in shaping Central Asia's future. Situated at the heart of the region and sharing borders with all the other Central Asian states, Uzbekistan is the most powerful and populous of the new states of Central Asia. 
In this volume, the historical origins of Uzbekistan are explored and the range of political, economic and social challenges faced by the country since independence is charted. Particular attention is given to the emergence of highly authoritarian politics in the country and the implications of this regime for the prospects of economic development, ethnic peace, and the growth of political Islam. 
The emergence of Tashkent as a force in the international system and the importance of Uzbekistan to other countries in the area, to regional powers and to the leading western countries and international organizations is also examined.

Uzbekistan: Transition To Authoritarianism On The Silk Road

Uzbekistan a Short Road Traveled

The Sound State of Uzbekistan: Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era (SOAS Studies in Music Series)

This is a police state
This is a democracy
This is rot-gut vodka
This is $2 prostitutes
This is Peace Corps
This is good intentions
This is Ramadan
This is loyalty
This is power outages
This is corruption
This is the Silk Route
This is the former USSR
This is Uzbekistan

Tom Fleming went to Uzbekistan as a forty-year-old Peace Corps volunteer. He was a fish out of water, an infidel in a Muslim land, teaching AIDS prevention and sex education in the most conservative region of Central Asia. With humor and poignancy "Taxi to Tashkent" portrays a land little known in the West. Instead of a nation rife with Islamic extremists as portrayed in the Western media, Fleming discovers a land of Korean discos, where blue eyed Muslims listen to Shania Twain, and where shop owners break into applause at the mention of America. Fleming travels throughout Uzbekistan, from the ecological disaster site of the Aral Sea, to the ancient Silk Route cities of Bukhara and Samarkand. "Taxi to Tashkent" describes a little-known corner of the world where nothing appears as it seems.

Taxi to Tashkent: Two Years with the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan

Drawing from a wide range of Uzbek and Russian sources, James Critchlow analyzes significant developments leading up to Uzbekistan's declaration of sovereignty and examines the outlook for the republic's emergence as an independent international player. The author's primary focus is on the Uzbek elites' attitudes and their efforts to throw off Moscow's hegemony by using popular grievances to mobilize mass support against the central Soviet government. Critchlow traces local grievances to two roots. The first is Uzbekistan's decades-long economic exploitation by Moscow through the imposition of an intensive cotton monoculture, the accumulated effects of which have been massive environmental degradation, illness, and death. The second is the central government's failure to adequately compensate Uzbekistan for these hardships and for the republic's overall contribution to the Soviet economy, while having further impoverished Uzbeks by limiting the range of their cultural and political expression. Among the manifestations of Uzbek resistance explored here are protests against russification and compulsory military conscription; persistent and open adherence to religious traditions; and loyalty above all to local political, ethnic, and family ties-- which frequently has led Moscow to charge the republic's leadership with "nepotism" and "corruption".

Now that their campaign for sovereignty has triumphed, will Uzbek leaders be able to solve the knotty political and economic problems their republic still faces? The analysis offered here illuminates this question and suggests possible answers.

Nationalism In Uzbekistan: A Soviet Republic's Road To Sovereignty

Nick Megoran explores the process of building independent nation-states in post-Soviet Central Asia through the lens of the disputed border territory between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In his rich "biography" of the boundary, he employs a combination of political, cultural, historical, ethnographic, and geographic frames to shed new light on nation-building process in this volatile and geopolitically significant region.
             Megoran draws on twenty years of extensive research in the borderlands via interviews, observations, participation, and newspaper analysis. He considers the problems of nationalist discourse versus local vernacular, elite struggles versus borderland solidarities, boundary delimitation versus everyday experience, border control versus resistance, and mass violence in 2010, all of which have exacerbated territorial anxieties. Megoran also revisits theories of causation, such as the loss of Soviet control, poorly defined boundaries, natural resource disputes, and historic ethnic clashes, to show that while these all contribute to heightened tensions, political actors and their agendas have clearly driven territorial aspirations and are the overriding source of conflict. As this compelling case study shows, the boundaries of the The Ferghana Valley put in succinct focus larger global and moral questions of what defines a good border.

Nationalism in Central Asia: A Biography of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Boundary

In recent years, the Uzbekistan government has been criticized for its brutal suppression of its Muslim population. This book, which is based on the author s intimate acquaintance with the region and several years of ethnographic research, is about how Muslims in this part of the world negotiate their religious practices despite the restraints of a stifling authoritarian regime. Fascinatingly, the book also shows how the restrictive atmosphere has actually helped shape the moral context of peoples lives, and how understandings of what it means to be a Muslim emerge creatively out of lived experience."

Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience

The Central Asian states gained independence in 1991, when the Soviet Union disintegrated. Immediately, they were plunged into a process of radical and simultaneous, transition in several spheres - from dependent Soviet republics to full membership of the international community; from centrally planned economies to free markets; from enforced specialisation in the production of raw materials to balanced mixed economies. These newly independent countries are still at a fragile stage of their development. Inevitably, the speed of recent changes has caused severe stresses in society. The incipient dangers that are now emerging could, if unchecked, jeopardise prospects for peace and prosperity in the region. This new study of Uzbekistan's special opportunities and challenges as it faces the twenty-first century will be of interest to strategists, politicians and students of the post-Soviet climate.

Uzbekistan

Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia

Tom Bissell

A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road

Christopher Aslan Alexander

Uzbekistan: The Golden Road To Samarkand

Calum Macleod

The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling Under Communism

Marianne Kamp

Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan

Erika Fatland

The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan

Laura L. Adams

Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador's Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror

Craig Murray

Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR

Adeeb Khalid

Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia

Douglas Northrop

Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit

Vandana Shiva

The Railway Children

E. Nesbit

Land Beyond the River: The Untold Story of Central Asia

Monica Whitlock

Tamerlane's Children: Dispatches from Contemporary Uzbekistan

Robert Rand

Beyond The Oxus: The Central Asians

Monica Whitlock

The Railway Children

E. Nesbit

The Modern Uzbeks: From the 14th Century to the Present : A Cultural History

Edward A. Allworth

The Vanishing Generation: Faith and Uprising in Modern Uzbekistan

Bagila Bukharbayeva

Uzbekistan: Transition To Authoritarianism On The Silk Road

Neil J. Melvin

Uzbekistan a Short Road Traveled

William C. Duncan

The Sound State of Uzbekistan: Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era (SOAS Studies in Music Series)

Kerstin Klenke

Taxi to Tashkent: Two Years with the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan

Tom Fleming

Nationalism In Uzbekistan: A Soviet Republic's Road To Sovereignty

James Critchlow

Nationalism in Central Asia: A Biography of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Boundary

Nick Megoran

Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience

Johan Rasanayagam

Uzbekistan on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century: Challenges to Stability and Progress

Islam Karimov

Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan

Erika Fatland