From Publishers Weekly
Bissell's first journey to the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996 was cut short by heartache and illness. Memories of that failure dog his return in 2001 to write about the rapidly deteriorating ecosystem of the Aral Sea. Once the size of Lake Michigan, the sea has already lost most of its water and will likely disappear by the middle of the next decade, leaving thousands of square kilometers of salty desert. Journalist Bissell examines that story, but also ponders broader questions about Uzbekistan and its people. Hooking up with Rustam, a young interpreter, he sets off on a road trip across the country. The format of the ensuing travelogue-cum-history lesson resembles that of itinerant political commentators like Robert Kaplan, right down to the repulsively exotic cuisine (e.g., boiled lamb's head) and digressionary mini-essays on the history of European imperialism in Central Asia. But Bissell rails against the way other authors "pinion entire cultures based upon how [their] morning has gone," aiming for a more accurate and balanced portrayal. An ongoing dialogue with Rustam over the region's history and culture, and the extent to which both were shaped by the Soviets, adds a personal dimension. The account doesn't flinch from portraying the region's corruption-crooked cops appear regularly on the scene-but despite the frequent bouts of despair, for both the region and himself, Bissell refuses to give up on the Uzbeks entirely. The humor and poignancy in this blend of memoir, reportage and history mark the author as a front-runner in the next generation of travel writers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The Central Asian country focused on here is Uzbekistan. In the mid-1990s, Bissell was a Peace Corps volunteer there, and in 2001 he returned, his aim to examine the destruction of the Aral Sea, whose rivers were diverted and drained to fertilize the desert to grow cotton. This ecological catastrophe left the former seabed's soil ruined and vegetation obliterated. Two dozen species of fish native to the Aral Sea were wiped out and the migration of millions of birds ceased. Traveling with Bissell was Rustam, who was half Uzbek and half Tajik and who served as the author's guide and translator. Bissell describes this alien land and its people while offering a history of the country and its culture; he also writes of his confrontations with the Uzbek police. This is more than just a travel book; the author's ingenious and sometimes humorous writing makes it a special read. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
I've earmarked nearly every page of this extraordinary travelogue, drawn back again and again to savor the dervish spin of Tom Bissell's prose, the dazzling starburst digressions of blazing intelligence, the banquet of historical narrative and fresh geopolitical commentary, the honest human drama of the author's journeys through the haunting landscapes and flashpoint cultures of Central Asia.--Bob Shacochis, author of The Immaculate Invasion

“If you don't think you want to read a book about Uzbekistan, think again.  Line by line, CHASING THE SEA is as smart and funny and entertaining a travel book as you'll find anywhere; and behind the lines are real passion and a wholly justified outrage over one of the world's great political and environmental catastrophes.  Tom Bissell is a terrifically sympathetic young writer.  Give yourself a treat and read him.” –Jonathan Franzen




Review
I've earmarked nearly every page of this extraordinary travelogue, drawn back again and again to savor the dervish spin of Tom Bissell's prose, the dazzling starburst digressions of blazing intelligence, the banquet of historical narrative and fresh geopolitical commentary, the honest human drama of the author's journeys through the haunting landscapes and flashpoint cultures of Central Asia.--Bob Shacochis, author of The Immaculate Invasion

?If you don't think you want to read a book about Uzbekistan, think again.  Line by line, CHASING THE SEA is as smart and funny and entertaining a travel book as you'll find anywhere; and behind the lines are real passion and a wholly justified outrage over one of the world's great political and environmental catastrophes.  Tom Bissell is a terrifically sympathetic young writer.  Give yourself a treat and read him.? ?Jonathan Franzen




Book Description
In 1960, the Aral Sea was the size of Lake Michigan: a huge body of water in the deserts of Central Asia. By 1996, when Tom Bissell arrived in Uzbekistan as a naïve Peace Corps volunteer, disastrous Soviet irrigation policies had shrunk the sea to a third its size. Bissell lasted only a few months before complications forced him to return home, but he had already become obsessed with this beautiful, brutal land.

Five years later, Bissell convinces a magazine to send him to Central Asia to investigate the Aral Sea’s destruction. There, he joins forces with a high-spirited young Uzbek named Rustam, and together they make their often wild way through the ancient cities—Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara—of this fascinating but often misunderstood part of the world. Slipping more than once through the clutches of the Uzbek police, who suspect them of crimes ranging from Christian evangelism to heroin smuggling, the two young men develop an unlikely friendship as they journey to the shores of the devastated sea.

Along the way, Bissell provides a history of the Uzbeks, recounting their region’s long, violent subjugation by despots such as Jenghiz Khan and Joseph Stalin. He conjures the people of Uzbekistan with depth and empathy, and he captures their contemporary struggles to cope with Islamist terrorism, the legacy of totalitarianism, and the profound environmental and human damage wrought by the sea’s disappearance.
Sometimes hilarious, sometimes powerfully sobering, Chasing the Sea is a gripping portrait of an unfamiliar land and the debut of a gifted young writer.

From the Inside Flap
In 1960, the Aral Sea was the size of Lake Michigan: a huge body of water in the deserts of Central Asia. By 1996, when Tom Bissell arrived in Uzbekistan as a naïve Peace Corps volunteer, disastrous Soviet irrigation policies had shrunk the sea to a third its size. Bissell lasted only a few months before complications forced him to return home, but he had already become obsessed with this beautiful, brutal land.

Five years later, Bissell convinces a magazine to send him to Central Asia to investigate the Aral Sea's destruction. There, he joins forces with a high-spirited young Uzbek named Rustam, and together they make their often wild way through the ancient cities—Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara—of this fascinating but often misunderstood part of the world. Slipping more than once through the clutches of the Uzbek police, who suspect them of crimes ranging from Christian evangelism to heroin smuggling, the two young men develop an unlikely friendship as they journey to the shores of the devastated sea.

Along the way, Bissell provides a history of the Uzbeks, recounting their region's long, violent subjugation by despots such as Jenghiz Khan and Joseph Stalin. He conjures the people of Uzbekistan with depth and empathy, and he captures their contemporary struggles to cope with Islamist terrorism, the legacy of totalitarianism, and the profound environmental and human damage wrought by the sea's disappearance.
Sometimes hilarious, sometimes powerfully sobering, Chasing the Sea is a gripping portrait of an unfamiliar land and the debut of a gifted young writer.

From the Back Cover
I've earmarked nearly every page of this extraordinary travelogue, drawn back again and again to savor the dervish spin of Tom Bissell's prose, the dazzling starburst digressions of blazing intelligence, the banquet of historical narrative and fresh geopolitical commentary, the honest human drama of the author's journeys through the haunting landscapes and flashpoint cultures of Central Asia.--Bob Shacochis, author of The Immaculate Invasion

“If you don't think you want to read a book about Uzbekistan, think again.  Line by line, CHASING THE SEA is as smart and funny and entertaining a travel book as you'll find anywhere; and behind the lines are real passion and a wholly justified outrage over one of the world's great political and environmental catastrophes.  Tom Bissell is a terrifically sympathetic young writer.  Give yourself a treat and read him.” –Jonathan Franzen




About the Author
Tom Bissell was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. He worked for several years as a book editor. His criticism, fiction, and journalism have appeared in Harper’s, Men’s Journal, Esquire, McSweeney’s, The Boston Review, and Best American Travel Writing 2003, among other publications. He has been nominated for several awards and not received any of them. He lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One

No English

April 2001

Anyone parted from his land will weep seven years. Whoever is parted from his tribe will weep until he dies.

--central asian proverb

April 2001

The night was hot or cold, depending on where one stood. In this it was not unlike swimming in the ocean and feeling across one's belly an amniotic warmth followed immediately by a freezing underwater gale. I paced around on the tarmac, examining the plane that had touched us down safely in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. The flight in was much fuller than I had expected, and my fellow passengers had disembarked. Most were, like me, standing on the tarmac and looking at the plane. It was dark, and there was not much else to look at. The plane was a fine gold-and-black Lufthansa jumbo jet. Lufthansa was the least dicey airline to fly into Tashkent, though Uzbekistan Airways, the national airline, was also quite good--internationally. Uzbekistan Airways's international flights employed Boeing and British-made jets easily as splendid as Lufthansa's. Uzbekistan was the only former Soviet republic other than Russia to have ever been allowed regular direct flights into the United States, something of which it was deservedly proud. On internal flights, however, Uzbekistan Airways sealed its passengers inside shaky old Russian-made Aeroflot propjets. One rumor I hoped to confirm on this trip was that, before takeoff on these internal flights, Uzbekistan Airways stewardesses poured everyone a heaping shot of vodka, including the captain. Including themselves.

Everything smelled hotly of fuel. It was as though we were downwind from a grounded F-15 with its engine at full burn. I remembered this smell. The last time I had smelled Tashkent was as a freshly arrived Peace Corps volunteer with hopes of teaching the natives English. I was not much of a traveler at the time. I used words like "natives." This was five years previous.

We had arrived in Tashkent at night. In 1996, only five years after Uzbekistan declared its independence from the Soviet Union, Tashkent's airport seemed ominously dark. When we landed and rolled toward the terminal, I saw that some of the runway lights were flickering. A few were burned out completely. Three-wheeled trucks of strange vehicular provenance sat abandoned along the runway. I remember that some of them were on fire, but this could be an enhanced memory. We deplaned and waited in clubbed silence on the tarmac. After a while a rickety metal tram arrived to haul us to the terminal. Inside the tram it was cattle-car dark and cold. It was a terrible joke--not mildly funny or even distracting--when, as the tram lurched toward the terminal, I began humming the theme to Schindler's List.

Now I waited for that same tram, upon that same tarmac, at that same airport. I looked around at my fellow passengers. Every pair of eyes shone with the glassy overlay of the seven-hour flight from Frankfurt. Every face was thick with sleeplessness. Many blue-jeaned and sweatshirted Germans idled around. I leaned over and asked a British man with whom I had chatted a bit on the plane, "What's with the Germans?" and rolling his eyes he answered, "Tour groups." Three tour groups, in fact. It seemed that, for reasons unknown, Germans love Central Asia. I later learned that they are, per capita, its most frequent tourists. Lingering on the crowd's edges were several slumped Uzbek or Turkish businessmen. They seemed tired, dignified, and quietly unhappy. I looked around. No one, with the exception of the Germans, appeared very happy, not even the young Russian-speaking Uzbeks in jean jackets and stylish black shoes carrying bags of duty-free booze and cigarettes. They looked over at me with lavish pouts and fading sullen eyes, still fried from having spent their weekend discothequeing in some glamorous international capital. Not typical citizens of Uzbekistan, needless to say. I wondered if they were government ministers' kids, seedlings of the vlasti (the unopposable few who controlled Soviet politics, culture, and society, and who in most of the former Soviet republics survived wholly intact), or the spawn of the Uzbek mafiya. Before I left on this trip, an Uzbek friend now living in Kentucky had sprung upon me the following koan: The economy in Uzbekistan was much, much worse today than in 1996, he said, but people were living better. I spent several nights attempting to comb the logic snarls from that sentence. Now, looking at nineteen-year-olds loaded up with importny loot, I had an idea of what he meant.

Those who were living better today were living better than anyone here had ever lived, better even than the Soviet bosses who in the 1970s had cruised around Tashkent in black Volgas with gray-curtained windows hiding the whores in the back seat. But ten years of corrupt, hybridized capitalismoid development was slowly teaching Uzbekistan's people that such lifestyles did not exist for those who had no "in," no clan, no muscle. No matter what average citizens of Uzbekistan did, no matter how good or honest or hardworking they were, the prestige-goods economy would remain beyond reach.

Two trams pulled up, their red running lights blinking. The tram I labored aboard was no cold, dark cattle car but a brightly lit Cobus 3000 with comfortable cushioned seats. It pleased me to see that Tashkent's airport seemed less eschatological than I remembered. Some of the buildings near the main terminal still looked slightly shelled, but several new buildings were going up.

The Germans had annexed Tram One, and Tram Two seemed drab in its silence. Some Russian was spoken, quietly, behind me. I turned. A young Uzbek mother in a leather jacket crouched and played peekaboo with her daughter. Her husband, a straphanging Uzbek wearing a gold watch, looked down at them and smiled with weary contentment. A cell phone blipped Mozart. Several people reached into their pockets, but only one withdrew. He was large, thick-necked, shaven-headed, Slavic. He glanced at the number on the phone's LCD, frowned, and put the phone back into his pocket. It rang a few more times and stopped.

Next to me was a young man wearing blue jeans and a flea-market dress shirt the color and texture of a tennis ball. His birdish thinness ceded a strange prominence to his otherwise normal-sized Adam's apple. The piping of his wraparound insectoid sunglasses was a bright iguana green. His chopped hair was purposefully messy. Everything about him suggested: American. He was enjoying a pose of which traveling Americans seem fond. This pose broadcast, roughly, I am an American, and you are an American, and we are both in a strange place. Despite that, I am not going to speak to you or make myself available in any way. I wondered if he was a Peace Corps volunteer fresh from a reefer-fueled jaunt across Thailand. Maybe he was an employ of one of the hipper agencies like Human Rights Watch. Maybe he was the "cool" Christian in some evangelical platoon spreading the Word to Central Asians. But he was returning to what he regarded as home--that much was obvious. He had the careless look of someone comfortable enough in a foreign environment not to worry anymore about looking like he belonged.

"Hey," I said.

He looked over at me. I could see nothing behind his tinted lenses. His mouth did not move.

"Do you live in Tashkent?"

He shook his head. His Adam's apple bobbed, then sank, its transit appearing somehow painful.

"Do you work here?"

"No English," he said suddenly.

"I'm sorry?"

He unplugged from himself a small flesh-colored earpiece. For the first time I heard the tinny sound of synthesized R&B. "No English," he said again. That everything about this young man suggested American should have been the first thing to tell me he was not an American.

"Oh," I told him. "Sorry."

He replugged his earpiece. "No problem."

A few moments later the tram stopped with an angry hydraulic hiss. The doors levered open. We filed into a long gray hallway that fed into the terminal. Tram One had beaten us here and already the end of the tunnel was clogged with humanity. Customs. Uzbekistan had for a time been one of the most difficult former Soviet republics to get into. This was not xenophobia. Rather, it reflected a long, complicated ignorance of how the mechanics of international travel were handled. Stalin had from the early 1930s until his death in 1953 sealed off Central Asia not only to other nations but to the Soviet people themselves. The legendarily stalwart adventurer Gustav Krist said in the 1930s that he "would sooner pay a call on the Devil and his mother-in-law in Hell" than travel through Central Asia without the proper papers. Travel here during that time often resulted in tragedy. Post-Stalin, there were two types of visitors to Uzbekistan: young banana-republic Communists from the Afro, Arab, and Asian worlds of Successful Socialist Modernization, who were flown to Tashkent, the New Showcase City of Modern Communism, in order to witness What the Future Held; and those few tourists who decided to endure a journey in this isolated, wildly unpredictable part of the world. The latter were almost always a part of the Soviet travel agency Intourist's forced marches through what the authorities allowed to be recognized as Uzbekistan's cultural highlights (very little Islam, much anonymous peasant striving, and only the most architecturally unignorable mosques). Uzbekistan, prior to its independence, had rarely seen its consciousness touched by the notion of individual, unauthorized travel. Even Uzbektourism, the infinitely more relaxed successor to Intourist, had for a time in the early 1990s demanded that all visitors present an invitation from an Uzbek host and documented proof of one's HIV-negative status. But things had changed. Provided you were a citizen of the United States, entry into Uzbekistan now require...