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- - - - SECTION: CUE; Pg. 09E LENGTH: 377 words HEADLINE: In Town: TOM BISSELL; Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia BYLINE: JOHN FREEMAN BODY: First-rate travel writers are a bit like pied pipers. If they play their tune well enough, readers follow them anywhere. In "Chasing the Sea," a fantastic memoir of traveling through the former Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, Tom Bissell proves he is a maestro of the genre at age 29. Read this book and it will be difficult to imagine not traipsing after him wherever he may go. Bissell, who visits Milwaukee this week to discuss his book, first went to Uzbekistan in 1996 as a Peace Corp volunteer. Illness and personal drama abbreviated his stay to just seven months. In 2001, he returned ferrying money to the offspring of a political exile and his own undying curiosity about the country's infamous Aral Sea. In 1960, this body of water was the size of Lake Michigan; today, it is the world's worst ecological disaster. In the past four decades, industry has siphoned away 70 percent of the sea's volume, destroyed many of its species, filled it with pollutants and turned the freshly revealed seabed into a wasteland of abandoned ships, sea salt and trash. The genius here is that Bissell does not approach this nightmare with an environmental agenda, nor does he fixate on culpability. Instead, he uses the sea as a lens through which to view a strange land and people. How would a country neglect its resources so much? What history came before its modern incarnation? Bissell's guide into the Uzbek through the cities of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara is a handsome young translator named Rustan, whose gimlet-eyed bitterness mirrors what they see and witness on their journey. Bissell's prose is an engine that keeps the trip going. His prose rips and snorts and coughs along like the sturdiest of Land Rovers. Bissell describes the land so well it feels it is rolling by right before us. Thanks to Bissell's rich and concise explanation of Uzbekistan's history, his beautiful descriptions of its landscape and people, "Chasing the Sea" will make readers feel, for 416 pages, that they've been there. A native of Michigan, Bissell is a journalist and fiction writer who lives in Brooklyn. --John Freeman October 19, 2003 - - - -
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