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The Silk Road: A New History (2012)

by Valerie Hansen(Favorite Author)

3.62 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0195159314 (ISBN13: 9780195159318)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

review 1: This is not a history of the Silk Road, or at least one that is remotely interesting. It is a collection of and description of documents, and throws innumerable terms and names at you that you cannot possibly know or recognize unless you are a brilliant scholar of the geography of China and the Middle East. Hansen skips around the time frame of the Silk Road not only across chapters, but within her chapters she takes time to tell stories and pour out information that is muddling and occasionally irrelevant. The author clearly did years of research, and the information is very thorough - but it's not for beginners, something you might expect from a book simply called The Silk Road. Perhaps if the information was presented differently and more focus was put on the key factor... mores about the Silk Road, the history could have been conveyed in a much more appealing and direct way.
review 2: Did you know the first printed book was not the Guttenberg Bible, but a Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra? And without the Chinese invention of paper, the printing press would not have allowed for mass scale reproduction of texts. Paper allows ink to adhere and absorb, unlike vellum or other documents used for recording written words and transactions. The Diamond Sutra was found in a library cave along the Silk Road, along with many other important historical documents (that were then stolen and smuggled out of the country by Aurel Stein, a researcher working on behalf of the Indian and British authorities in the early 1900s). An excellent read on the history of the Silk Road that clarifies and corrects previously Western-based (and biased) histories. The author is able to write in a manner that non-academics can follow. I look forward to reading other histories by Valerie Hansen. less

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