two new books

I have two new books on the go.  

On Friday I bought Peter Frankopan : The Silk Roads, a new history of the world.  And yesterday I bought Tim Marshall : Prisoners of Geography, ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics. They are both ‘big picture’ demonstrations. They complement each other. 

The implications of the Silk Road captured my attention when I bought Christopher Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road some five years ago. This told me so much I did not already know about the great forces that came and went along the main routes linking east and west across Central Eurasia. 

Peter Frankopan begins with the Creation of the Silk Road and adds two dozen more roads including The Road of Cold Warfare, and The American Silk Road. I find myself so much drawn into those chapters which cover the decades I have lived through. Inevitably I find myself most affected by what we were not told at the time and how much my own world view has changed since then.

Tim Marshall’s title tells us exactly what the book is about : how the possibilities and the restrictions of land and sea have affected and will go on affecting the dreams and desires of warlords, traders, and others of that ilk in the past, the present and the future. For the first time I feel I have been informed about the full horror of Sykes-Picot and the almost remoteness of the built-in attitudes which were responsible. I wish I could say :  now we know better. But I can’t. I look back over what to me has been the recent past and recognise that it takes only one or two exercisers of power to make catastrophic decisions based on their having only one very limited view of reality. 

Where and in what kind of a world might I enjoy a future life?