LAND BEYOND THE RIVER: The Untold Story of Central Asia

Whitlock, a reporter for the BBC World Service, aspires to write a people's history of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan from 1909 to the present. "There are no accounts in English of Central Asia during the Second World War" reads a terse entry in Whitlock's bibliography, suggesting a problem with this approach: people's histories are difficult to present when a region has little in the way of recorded history. Whitlock is forced to weave in an inordinate amount of textbook-level exposition between her firsthand refugee interviews and excerpts from the unpublished diaries of dissidents, resulting in a book bursting out of its own category. Whitlock's intermittent focus on her close relationship with the inhabitants of these remote mountain valleys tends to make her prose veer toward the romantic, as when she describes how Uzbeks conscripted to patrol the Afghan border in June 1997 "walked back swiftly into the hot, black night, thick with the song of crickets." In the hands of a more gifted writer, such an ambitious approach might have successfully blended the newsworthy and the mundane, but Whitlock's prose is too pedestrian. Her preference is clearly for the "unsentimental lives of survivors," and she escorts us through the diplomatic activities of the elites with apparent reluctance. Although this book is certainly of interest to those with a serious curiosity about the region, more casual readers might wait a few years until this untold story is better told. Illus., maps. (Nov. 3)