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- - - - SECTION: Travel; Book Explorer; Pg. I2 LENGTH: 728 words HEADLINE: Chasing the shrinking presence of the Aral Sea: Stories capture the entrancing region of Uzbekistan and the Karalpak people SOURCE: The Gazette BYLINE: PAUL CARBRAY BODY: The former Soviet Union committed a long series of ecological crimes, most of them on the outskirts of its vast territory, but perhaps none as devastating as the destruction of the Aral Sea. The Aral Sea, in the heart of Central Asia, was once the size of Lake Michigan, a body of water that provided irrigation for the crops of the villagers in an often arid land and the source of a thriving fishing industry. But Soviet planners decided that Uzbekistan should be the centre of a cotton-growing industry. So the waters of the Aral Sea were sucked away to provide irrigation for vast acres of cotton, one of the thirstiest crops. The result was that the Aral has shrunk to a third of its former size. Villages that were once beside the sea are now miles inland, dust storms blanket the region and temperatures, once moderated by the water, have skyrocketed. When Tom Bissell was a Peace Corps volunteer in Central Asia in 1996, the Aral Sea had already shrunk. Not long out of university, frighteningly immature and ill and homesick, he lasted only a few months. But Bissell had grown entranced with the area, so he persuaded a magazine to send him to Uzbekistan to report on the shrinking Aral Sea and its effect on the Karalpaks, the people who live by the sea. As Bissell admits, even spending a few months in Uzbekistan had spurred him to write about the area and do research on its history. "When writing, I tried to keep whatever I learned very light - stories less within the anthropological tradition and more within the tradition of, say, Typee, which was written by (Herman) Melville after spending four week among his Polynesian subjects, although he claimed it was four months," he writes. But for this book, Bissell isn't spending a few days for a hit-and-run book. He doesn't want to imitate authors who "pinion entire cultures based upon how (their) morning has gone." Bissell doesn't so much march to the Aral Sea as sneak up on it. Much of Chasing the Sea recounts his slow passage through one of the world's entrancing regions. In company with his scapegrace interpreter and friend Rustam, master of American slang and possessor of some mysterious family secrets, Bissell travels along the former Silk Road and visits some of the world's most little-known cities - Khiva, Bokhara and Samarkand - that were once forbidden to the non-Muslim and the cockpits of bitter repression and fascinating history. Bissell mixes the travelogue and history lesson well, recounting the long history of repression in the area, from the hordes of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane to the commissars of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Along the way, we meet such stalwarts as Alexander "Bokhara" Burnes, the Scottish-born explorer who was the first Briton to visit the area and a major player in Britain's ill-fated move into Afghanistan in the 1830s. Bissell, who admits that "temperamentally, I'm a giant wussy," nevertheless doesn't shrink from exploring some of the seamier areas of the country and doesn 't shy away from trying some exotic cuisine, such as sheep's head. For the reader unacquainted with Uzbekistan and its neighbours, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, he provides a handy primer on the tangled history of one of the world's most exotic areas, along with a witty chronicle of his adventures with Rustam and a cast of sometimes shady characters. In fact, Bissell has the perfect remedy to deflect the sometimes intimidating attentions of the natives: "I told them I was from Canada," he writes. "A guaranteed interest-repellent." But his light-hearted journey along the Silk Road becomes more sombre when he finally arrives at the Aral Sea. But, as Ian Small, an official with the aid agency Medecins sans Frontieres, tells him, there is at least a recognition of the problem. As Small puts it, it's all connected with the five-point Soviet plan for dealing with crisis. "It's rather famous," he tells Bissell. "Step One is to make the crisis worse. Step Two is to blame the Jews. Step Three is to punish the innocent. ... Step Four is to hand out medals. And Step Five is - " "Recognize the problem," I said. "Right. There's no Soviet Union any more, but we're currently at Step Five. And now you're part of helping people work toward that recognition." ----- Chasing the Sea Tom Bissell Pantheon Books 388 pages, $37.95 October 25, 2003 - - - -
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