Book Rec of the Day 4/13/2007

HISTORIES

This history of the trade route that connected the Far East to Europe might have been a dry, academic tome in less clever hands. Whitfield makes it brilliant and fascinating. She models the book on The Canterbury Tales, focusing each chapter on one of the people who traveled the road: the monk, the princess, the merchant, the soldier, and so on. All the details of daily life are here with the richness and color you expect from a Central Asian expedition of a millennium ago. A wonderful armchair voyage.

LIFE ALONG THE SILK ROAD, by Susan Whitfield (University of California Press, 2001)