History - Asia - Central Asia

"With compelling and candid prose, Berkoff takes us to the front lines as life-or-death decisions are made involving living and breathing characters. You must read this to understand what the war was like for the war fighters." -- Jake Tapper, award-winning journalist and author...

"A must read for anyone who wants to learn more about the history of the Islamic world" (San Francisco Chronicle) We in the West share a common narrative of world history. But our story largely omits a whole civilization whose citizens shared an entirely...

Chris Horton is a freelance reporter in Taiwan, having covered cross-strait politics, domestic politics, the economy, culture and breaking news in Taiwan for The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Financial Times and Quartz. He has lived in Taiwan since 2015 and...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction - A New York Times bestseller "The CIA itself would be hard put to beat his grasp of global events . . . Deeply satisfying." --The New York Review of Books From the award-winning and bestselling author...

The forgotten story of Central Asia's enlightenment--its rise, fall, and enduring legacy In this sweeping and richly illustrated history, S. Frederick Starr tells the fascinating but largely unknown story of Central Asia's medieval enlightenment through the eventful lives and astonishing accomplishments of its greatest...

A Best Book of the Year: The Economist, Slate, Kirkus Reviews In 1839, nearly 20,000 British troops poured through the mountain passes into Afghanistan and installed the exiled Shah Shuja on the throne as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the...

Rock art is mankind's oldest artistic expression. The first creation of rock carvings (petroglyphs) and rock paintings (pictographs) by Homo sapiens represented on multiple counts a quantum leap in mental performance. In Rock Art and its Legacy in Myth and Art Christoph Baumer tells...

An unforgettable journey through Central Asia, one of the most mysterious and history-laden regions of the world. Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan became free of the Soviet Union in 1991. But though they are new to modern statehood, this is a region rich...

This phenomenal international bestseller is "an admirable, revealing portrait of daily life in a country that Washington claims to have liberated but does not begin to understand" (Washington Post). This mesmerizing portrait of a proud man who, through three decades and successive repressive regimes,...

"Fascinating....A highly readable history of the conflict." --New York Times Book Review In The Great Gamble, a groundbreaking account of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, former NPR Moscow correspondent Gregory Feifer vividly depicts the war that contributed greatly to the demise of the USSR,...

Cundill Prize FinalistA Financial Times Book of the YearA Spectator Book of the YearA Five Books Book of the Year The Mongols are known for one thing: conquest. But in this first comprehensive history of the Horde, the western portion of the Mongol empire...

The Mongol Empire changed the world, but early chronicles of its conquests, written from regional perspectives and widely dispersed, could not convey its far-reaching significance. The Khan and the Unicorn details how historians from different cultures collectively rediscovered their common past and transformed the...

Haim Abraham, born in 1897 in Turkmenistan, wrote out his memoir in a spiral-bound notebook covering a period of ninety years. After he passed away in 1999, the journal was discovered in his home, written in an ancient language: Judeo-Farsi. Years later, the journals...

A broad comparative study that highlights the importance of the Eurasian steppe and its impact on the arc of Russian history Throughout its existence, Russia has been a hybrid empire shaped by both Europe and Asia. Focusing on the formation of the Russian state...