Once in Kazakhstan: The Snow Leopard Emerges

I found this book to be a shallow view into present day Kazakhstan, with small insight into the region as a whole. The book does little to shed light on the cultural history and core of Kazakhstani society. An easy read, but not especially enlightening. "The Lost Heart of Asia" is a better bet for an incredible overview of the regions ebbs and flows and the cultural nuances which influence Central Asia, which is a more helpful view. Also consider "The Silent Steppe" for a modern history of the country.

We adopted 2 children from Kaz and spent 6 weeks 'in country' and this book put me back in Kazakhstan. Great writing, beautiful insights.

His political commentary is poorly researched and very 'immature' but don't let that distract you from a truly good book, I cherished every page. If you are interested in Kaz, this is a great book
john

PS I'm hoping he reads this review and writes a second, more researched book, which begins where the first book ends.

Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, I've had an interest in Central Asia and the Caucuses. In 1994, two good friends were in Kazakhstan working on privatization, and I've read the more readily available books on the area, such as Eastern Approaches and all the excellent Hopkirk volumes. Rosten's self-published diary of his time in Kazakhstan as a Fullbright scholar in 1993 is a moderately informative account of the large nation's baby steps as a modern nation. With a background as a lawyer and business school training, Rosten is well qualified to tell this tale of a country trying to sort out a legal system, elections, and a functioning economy. However, his fluency in Russian is what really allows him to mix with people at different levels of society and get the flavor of the place. For the most part, his diary is typical of books by Westerners spending a year or two abroad: the problems of finding a place to live, breakdowns in municipal services like garbage collection, hot water, heat, etc., arbitrary taxi fares, strange foods, the prevalence of vodka, transportation problems, and so forth.

His coverage of the emerging nation is a little more in-depth, as the country struggles to arrange reasonable elections and constitution. All of which is intertwined with the ever-present thorny "nationalities" question, which boils down to whether ethnic Russians will get a fair shake in a Kazakh nation. This is a pretty contentious issue of course, since the Kazakh population was nearly halved under Stalin's rule, and a program of Russian settlement was set up (much as China has done in its far Western provinces and Tibet over the last thirty years). Probably the best bits in the book are the details about the first election and the problems with it, although its outcome is depressingly familiar stuff, with the ex-communist bosses all still in power. Indeed, Kazakhstan's autocrat, Nazarbayev is ever-present in the narrative, but Rosten doesn't offer nearly as much criticism of his as one might expect. Strong-men like Nazarbayev have little to offer other than vague assurances of stability, and the world seems to shrug in disinterest when the elections are rigged or he announces constitutional changes that give him total control over the country. Add endemic corruption to the mix and it's hardly any wonder that repressed and frustrated people eventually turn to political Islam or other external outlets to try and effect change. Indeed, other than commenting on how disorienting it must be for people Rosten doesn't really comment much at all on the drive to privatize and potential effects of encouraging rampant capitalism. Of course, the result has been a tiny corrupt elite skimming the cream, and a great deal of problems at the lower end of society. Joma Nazpary's book (which I have not read) "Post-Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan " examines this in some detail via fieldwork and interviews.

In any event, Rosten's book has a great number of weaknesses. First and foremost is the diary format. I certainly enjoy the personal perspective, which tends to be much more readable than straight dry history or reportage. A good example is Tom Bissell's narrative of Uzbekistan, Chasing the Sea, which weaves personal experience with a good cribbed history lesson. However, Rosten's account is so choppy that it becomes a real nuisance to read as he jumps willy-nilly from topic to topic. It also means that certain topics are covered in multiple places, and a great deal of information and anecdotes are repeated, some three times over! A good editor could have chucked the diary format and arranged a more flowing narrative that covered each piece in turn and greater depth. For example, it would have been nice to learn a little more about the large Korean population. Or why it is exactly that the Jewish population hasn't fled en masse. More disturbingly, although I am no expert by any means on the region or culture, I did come across a very obvious factual error towards the end which made me question Rosten's accuracy about other things. On page 228 he writes "Nauryz is a traditional Moslem holiday celebrating the New Year.... It is celebrated on March 22. " The Muslim New Year is called "Al-Hijra" and because Islam uses a lunar calendar, it falls on completely different days in each of the Gregorian calendar years. "Nauryz" (more commonly Nowruz) marks the Persian New Year, falls on the vernal equinox (usually March 21 or 22) and is based in the Zoroastrian religion.

The actual prose leaves a great deal to be desired as well. In some places he gets into a groove and writes fluidly and easily, and in others it is very very choppy and wooden. Strings of sentences, each containing a single fact. Again, an editor could have easily cleaned this up and made it a much better read. Attempts at humor generally fall flat, and never does one get a true sense of the emotional confusion and frustration that many of the people he talks to must have felt. On an aesthetic level, the self-publishing format means that there is a notable deficiency in the supplementary material. There is no map (these tend to be very expensive), which is a huge flaw for a book about an unfamiliar country. And although the book has lots of photos, the quality of the reproduction is exceedingly low--worse than a typical newspaper (this is a function of the print-on-demand technology used to print the book).

Ultimately, the book isn't awful, it just isn't that great. Much of what is recounted is pretty typical travelers tales type stuff, and one is going to get a very basic introduction to the country and people. It's true, there isn't a great deal out there on modern Kazakhstan, but most readers will be better served by the 2nd edition of Martha Brill Olcott's "The Kazakhs", which includes a fifty pages on independence and the next few years. Her subsequent book "Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled Promise" gets into recent years in rather more detail than most will want, and the subtitle gives on the gist of it. This is not a book I'd recommend to anyone except those who feel the need to read every word published on the region.

It's a rare kind of book: it provides a spatial picture of everyday life and political history of a huge country rising up for its independence, but is written mainly in short, wise stories, sometime as anecdotes. This is not a disadvantage, if we remember that a lot of classic historical works were written in this fashion - the personal view and personal feelings of the author on the events and political leaders, which fall outside any political science methodology.

As somebody with Soviet life experience (childhood, youth), partly in Kazakhstan, I was interested in the foreign view and thoughts on Eurasia's biggest country, Kazakhstan. After all, there aren't that many books written by journalists about this country. (I am not sure whether historians or ethnographers wrote anything more than studies of their own narrow specific problems. General views that better fit foreigners who visit Kazakhstan or want to learn about this country.)

In short, I found in it a lot of good stories on the recent life, written with humor and occasional philosophical smiles.

I left the USSR about 20 years ago and visited only twice. I think I can safely say that Rosten, with his very good command of Russian and his good friends, managed to avoid many of the literary traps that strangers often fall into, when touring the former USSR environment. The reader can trust the authenticity of every small detail he mentioned in this book, and the whole book in the entirety of its atmosphere, discussion and philosophy.

Keith Rosten traveled to be a Fulbright lecturer in Kazakhstan. This former Soviet republic holds an important place in history--crossroads of the Silk Road in Central Asia, it is a mixing pot of the Far East and the easternmost reaches of Europe. The people are Asiatic and Turkic, far different than the Russians who moved in during the Soviet era. The time covered in this memoir is the early 90's, when Kazakhstan made the painful transition from Soviet republic to a nation on its own (though associated in the Russian circle.) The turmoil of ethnic conflict, monetary upheavals are well documented here.

But what I really appreciated was the more personal observation about daily life. Rosten travels around Kazakhstan and reports the customs of the people in personal detail--this is the best part of the book. How much vodka to order for a party (surprise; 1 bottle per every 2 adults. Women will drink champagne...maybe.) He tries to avoid getting into drinking matches, sipping the edge of his glass and we imagine him watering the potted plants secretly now and then. The cold weather, the markets, the local cuisine (horse is on the menu) and the juxtaposition of statues of Lenin surrounded by ceremonial yurts. It's a wonderful journey and Rosten tells it simply and well. This is not only a book about recent historical events, it's a personal book--his time as a guest in a foreign land. I loved it and if you are an armchair traveler, you will want to pick this up and read it.