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Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared | 
 enlarge | Author: Christopher Robbins
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy New: $14.98
You Save: $9.02 (38%)
New (18) Used (6) from $10.32
Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 41269
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.2 x 5.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0977743381
Dewey Decimal Number: 915.845
EAN: 9780977743384
ASIN: 0977743381
Publication Date: April 21, 2008
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Product Description
A funny and revealing travelogue of Kazakhstan, a country rich with wild tulips, oil, nomads who hunt with golden eagles, and a disappearing landlocked sea.
Closed to foreigners under Tsar and Soviet rule, Kazakhstan has remained largely hidden from the world, a remarkable feat for a country the size of Western Europe. Few would guess that Kazakhstan—a blank in Westerners' collective geography—turns out to be diverse, tolerant, and surprisingly modern, the country that gave the world apples, trousers, and even, perhaps, King Arthur.
Christopher Robbins enjoyed unprecedented access to the Kazakh president while crafting this travelogue, and he relates a story by turns hilarious and grim. He finds Eminem-worship by a shrinking Aral Sea, hears the Kazakh John Lennon play in a dusty desert town, joins nomads hunting eagles, eats boiled sheep's head (a delicacy), and explores some of the most beautiful, unspoiled places on earth. Observant and culturally attuned, Robbins is a master stylist in the tradition of travel writing as literature, a companion to V. S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 awesome reading July 17, 2008
best book I've ever read. will read over and over again. The chapters keep you interested and the author is supurb.
 Great personal exploration of Kazakhstan July 11, 2008
As an adoptive parent planning to travel to Kazakhstan in the next few months, I really enjoyed this book. It gave some good history of the country and kept the reader engaged with personal stories of travel and friendships made. A great intro to Kazakhstan - it's people, climate, geography, and history and I particularly enjoyed the illustrations included on nearly every page.
An absolute delight July 9, 2008
For anyone interested in this fascinating region, or the armchair traveler, this book is a must!
Amusing and educational: it fed my desire to visit Kazakhstan July 5, 2008
This is a strange mixture of a travelogue and an anecdotal history of Kazakhstan. Robbins characterizes Kazakhstan as an ancient country which has been long forgotten in the West, and he seeks to rediscover the diversity of its past and present.
He describes his travels from the wild steppes of the central country, to the old capital at Almaty, to the nightclubs of the brash new modern capital at Astana. As we travel, he provides interesting historical side stories on the Kazakhstan exiles of Trotsky, Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn; on Sakharov's witnessing of the first Soviet H-bomb tests; and on the horrific forced labor camps of Stalin's Gulag. He also recounts many other fragments of its history, not least that indeed "apples are from Kazakhstan".
As part of his visit, Robbins had multiple interviews with President Nazarbayev and was allowed to travel with him during a tour of some of Kazakhstan's remoter areas. Nazarbayev's quoted reminiscences are interesting, especially around the fall of the Soviet Union and the birth of independent Kazakhstan (although like all politician's memoirs, his words should probably be read cautiously). Robbins has clearly benefited from Nazarbayev's help and in return he is notably delicate in addressing potentially awkward issues. There have been allegations of significant high level corruption in Kazakhstan and of the forcible discouraging of political opposition, but those are not topics that Robbins dwells on.
On the plus side, Robbins has clearly fallen in love with Kazakhstan and he paints a broadly sympathetic picture of a country that has a difficult past, a beautiful but often, barren landscape, a climate of hot summers and extreme winters. He presents a country which is unusually tolerant and, with the benefit of oil wealth, is growing prosperous and (by the standards of the region) relatively open.
This is more of a travelogue than a deep history or social analysis, but I found it consistently interesting and educational, and often amusing. It left me with a much better sense of Kazakhstan's difficult history and of its relatively optimistic present.
An Apple for the Author June 14, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
A valuable introduction to an important area of the world that most of us have neither been to nor know much about.
This standard, albeit well-written, travel book, with lots of local color, is made much more important by the inclusion of serious words on the tortured political evolution of Kazakhstan: the days of the Gulag; deadly nuclear testing; the virgin lands/ecological disasters; and the end game of the USSR. Mr. Robbins, an English observer quite positive about Kazakhstan and its current president, ends with finding the present to be a relatively bright time for the varied peoples residing in these vast and hard steppes.
(I think the dust jacket design by Yoshiki Waterhouse is excellent, as are the rough drawings that are planted throughout the text.)
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