There are writers.  Then there are Writers.  Tom Bissell is a Writer. Lured by an incredible spurt of nobility (or stupidity), he decided to join the Peace Corps in college and was stationed in Uzbekistan.  You know how I always talk trash about Russia?  Uzbekistan makes Russia look like the Rockville Whole Foods by comparison.  Bissell ended up not finishing his stint, hightailing it out of the country after seven months (out of a two-year assignment.)  But then, five years later, he came back  to write Chasing the Sea, a book whose subtitle is Being a Narrative of a Journey Through Uzbekistan, Including Descriptions of LIfe Therein, Culminating with an Arrival at theAral Sea, the World’s Worst Man-Made Ecological Catastrophe, in One Volume.

This pretty much tells you all you need to know about the book.  What I’ll add that it is incredibly rich and layered in its descriptions of Uzbek and post-Soviet culture, infused with history, geography, cultural tidbits, and Uzbek and Russian language trivia that even me, a native Russian speaker of the highest caliber (equivalent to a kindergarten-level fluency in Russian reading), would have never known in a million years.  And Bissell is an extremely, extremely talented writer.  Reading this book has launched him into my top-five authors list, which at the moment, includes Shalom Auslander, Gary Shteyngart, Suzanna Clarke, Philip Pullman, and Charles Dickens. (If you click on the last link, do not pass go, do not collect $200, and go straight back to your 9th grade English class.) (Ok, top 6.  It’s hard to choose.  And count.)

Bissell’s journey starts in Tashkent and sprawls through Bukhara, Gulistan, where he served his term, and Samarkand, before finally winding up at Moynaq, the town that’s the front line for the ecological disaster that is the Aral Sea (depleted to almost 1/4 its original size by Soviet means.) He does this by taking copious, copious notes at every location he visits, recreating everything in such vivid detail that you don’t need to fill out five entry visa forms to Uzbekistan or suffer from a case of The Troubles while eating shashlik.   He is assisted by his trusty translator/local college student/perfect example of homo post-Soveticus, Rustam.

This book is everything you will ever need in a travel book, a history book, a ethnography book, and a guide to Russian swearwords and how to evade Uzbek narcotic-sniffing dogs, as well as everything you need to know about eating sheep heads.  This book is so good that it could testify in front of Congress in place of Sonia Sotomayor.  This book is so good it could roundhouse kick Chuck Norris.  This book is so good it could balance the state budget of California.  This book is so good I laughed out loud.  I never laugh out loud, except for at this craigslist ad.

Why?  Aside from the richness of it, I LOVE the tone.  Just love it.  It’s just so cynical, so understanding of the Soviet and Uzbek culture and subtleties, and so deadpan, that every page contains a catchphrase that I bookmarked.  And it’s a library copy. Librarians, have mercy on me.  Here are a few of my favorite passages:

[in Bukhara] Our morning began as all mornings in Bukhara must, or should: drinking tea beneath the trees in the shady beauty of Lyab-i-Hauz while two ancient Uzbek raconteurs named Alisher and Alisher described life in the Old City in the 1930s and 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s.

[in the Tashkent metro with Rustam] Rustam stared down at the floor.

-You have some admirers, I whispered.  He looked up.
-Over there. I said.

Rustam found them and smiled.  They all turned simultaneously inward, a giggling huddle.  An old babushka in a yellow hair net and dark blue stockings sitting near the girls pushed her mouth off to the side in an attempt to stifle her smirk.

-Tashkent girls, Rustam said rhapsodically.  Theyr’e the best.  You can talk to the hottest ones.  You can even score with them, dude.  Unless they’re, like, mafiya bitches or something like this.

-I doubt many mafiya women ride the subway though.

-Dude, I don’t know.

[On a flight to the Ferghana Valley]  I turned away from the window and sipped my plastic cup of apple juice.

-I was under the impression that you were served vodka on these local flights.

-Vodka, Rustam asked, Nah who told you this?

-I don’t remember.  I heard it somewhere, from someone.

-The only people who would get vodka would be the pilots.

-That’s comforting.

-Just enough to relax them.

-I’d hate for them to be nervous.

He looked past me out the window, slapping his knees with sudden hambone flair.

-You’re gonna love Ferghana.  It’s like Russia, except prettier.  And I have to say, the people in Ferghana are much cooler than in the rest of the country.

-How do you mean?

-You know, bro.  In Ferghana we’re…mountain people?  Valley people?

-Okay.

-Everyone else in Uzbekistan is desert people.  Desert people are much more, like, stressed out about everything.  In the mountains you can just chill. Nothing is a big deal.  The Kyrgyz are like that.  They’re calm.  They don’t worry.

-But isn’t Tajikistan 80% mountainous?  They didn’t seem to be very willing to chill during their civil war.

Seriously.  Please read this book if you have any shred of decency.  Or if you just like travel books/books about Central Asia.   It starts like this,

The night was hot or cold, depending on where one stood.  It was not unlike swimming in the ocean and feeling across one’s belly an amniotic warmth followed immediately by a freezing underwater gale.

In the meantime, enjoy this song, a tribute to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, in its native language, Russian, of course.

I recently read The Desert Contract by John Lathrop.

As a novel, it was ok.  I mean, it had all the things a novel needs to have: characters, plot, and setting.  The characters were so flat I could probably inflate them with a helium tank and they would still collapse like failed Macy’s floats onto the Sands of Saudi Arabia, which are featured prominently in the book.  Oh yeah, I should probably tell you that the novel is about an American businessman, Jack  Kemp, who is an expat selling investments in the Middle East. He’s come back from LA because the tech bubble and pretty much all of Western civilization as we know it, has popped.  So he’s back in Saudi, shilling his product. And, surprise!  By COMPLETE COINCIDENCE, he meets his lover from the first time he was in the Gulf (after the 1991 War), pretty, Irish Helen.  She’s just so Irish, you know!  She says silly words like banshee and greets Jack with “Dia duit,” because she’s always been proud of her Gaelic.  She is also anatomically perfect.  She is slender, with a column-like neck (as opposed to square,) square shoulders (as opposed to column-like,) and breasts that were full but not heavy.  Her complexion is milk-white Irish.  Three cheers for Lucky Charms!

Helen.

I gotta give Lathrop a break, though.  This is his first novel.  Aside from the flat characters, constant cliches, and gross oversimplification, the book is pretty good. He does have very keen powers of observation about expat life in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf in general.  In fact, Saudi Arabia is his most vibrant character in the book.   The sands, the chaos, and most of all, the glittering emptiness in the sunshine and winds of the Gulf are what infuse the novel with atmosphere.   Read it for the descriptions alone.

A quote from the novel to get you thinking:

Her husband sat up, his eyes refocused.  “Right above us,” he said, “your next port of call.  Yousef.  Joe, as he prefers to be called.  Our upstairs neighbor.  I expect he passes himself off to you as American.  In fact he’s Iraqi.  Born in Basra.  Grew up like a Saudi in Jedda, but I suspect he’s Shia.  On the wrong side of the tracks.  Made it to the States years ago, when you were still letting in anyone, and got some kind of bogus degree.  You should be careful of him.  He’s the worst kind of Arab: half Westernized.  The kind who don’t know who they are, and don’t know the rules.  Or don’t give a damn.  They think the rules don’t apply.  The kind of Arab who’s on the fence.  And, when push comes to shove, who knows which side they’ll jump down on?”

After reading about his descriptions of Al Khobar, Saudi, and the surrounding area, I couldn’t resist picture-surfing to find out more about Saudi Arabia, which I will never be allowed to visit, because I make Passover matzah from the blood of Christian babies.  Also, I’m a kvetcher.

We reached the outskirts of town.  Sunken oases slipped by on each side-irregular patches of farm, rows of grayish date palms- clinging to a stunted life over a pumped-out and contaminated water table.  Finally we turned back to the coast road.

Here are some pics of the locations described in the book.  Mabruk.

Swimming pool..or fountain.

Subtle half-crescent Islam play park

This is how they do Google in Al Khobar.

The dusty desolation of the highway . Are we sure this isn't Texas?

Cross-posted on Swifteconomics.

Do you have a very sassy New York-born Jewish grandma?  Chances are, she is exactly like Anna Schwartz.  Except in addition to being sassy, Anna Schwartz is also a noted and very knowledgeable American economist, collaborating with Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman on their seminal work about the Great Depression, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867 – 1960.   The book is very detailed and criticizes government intervention during the Great Depression and its aftermath.   You can  read parts of it as a Google Book here.  This book changed the way many people thought about monetary policy and shifted the viewpoint that looking at money activity was not important to how the economy worked.

Please make me some matzah ball soup. Then school the Fed.

(Source: The Wall Street Journal)

Anna Schwartz is often not mentioned in lieu of Milton Friedman, but she contributed in equal parts to the research they conducted together.  You can see another piece they wrote, specifically focusing on the Great Depression, here. That was in 1963.  Schwartz, at 93,  is still working full-time at the National Bureau of Economic Research where she started her career in 1941.  Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal recently interviewed her on her thoughts about the Fed’s handling of the current economic crisis.

She brings up some great points, on the transparency of the Fed:

The market is just bewildered. Bernanke came into office insisting that the Fed would be much more transparent than it had been in the past. But I don’t believe that it’s lived up to that. If the market understood what the Fed was planning in each case, and could see a design, then I think the market would have reacted much more positively.

I remember when we went to the Federal Reserve as part of a field trip with my university Economics Club (where I was the Vice President.  Don’t laugh at me,) and I got to sit in Greenspan’s chair as one of the Federal Reserve governors told us about the Reserve’s plans to become more transparent, primarily by releasing the minutes of their meetings to the public, earlier.  I remember then I was impressed, and defended the Fed’s plans toward transparency all the way to the end.  But, like Schwartz tells it, this isn’t happening.

Ballin' hard in Greenspan's chair

As many economists know, transparency is key to free market functionality, and essentially, the big problem that brought down credit default swaps: no one knew what was going on with them, hence, they couldn’t be valued correctly.

She also is not happy at all with what Bernanke is doing:

Ryssdal: It sounds like you’re frustrated with Chairman Bernanke and the White House, that they maybe haven’t learned the lessons of history that you and Milton Friedman wrote about.

SCHWARTZ: Well, I think that that’s a fair statement. Considering Bernanke’s background, you would have expected a much more, should I say a tidy kind of performance by the Federal Reserve. Seemed to be something that was ad hoc and introduced without considering all the implications.

It’s one thing when TV pundits that don’t know much about economic policy criticize or praise government actions to reverse the recession.  It’s another when you are schooled by someone who could be your grandma, if your grandma had a Ph.D. in economics and was one of the foremost monetary policy analysts in the world.

I don’t know about you, but I always love a good story about how the U.S. government screws over its constituents. Turkmeniscam by Ken Silverstein (journalist and fellow Jew) promises such a story and delivers with style. The subtitle, “How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship,” says it all.

The amount of corruption that Silverstein uncovers in the United States government is alarming.  He starts with the background of the fallout against Jack Abramoff and other lobbyists in the fall of 2006, and goes on to explore the ultrashady relationship between, specifically, international lobbyists willing to shill dictatorships for large amounts of money.

He writes,

When one flips through the pages of the [U.S. government's annual survey of global human rights in March 2007], it becomes apparent that many of the countries most severly criticized for human rights abuses had fon from the Bush administration foreign aid, military assistance, adn expanded trade opportunities.  A number of leaders from these countries have also won coveted White House visits, and accompanying photo ops with Bush or other senior officials.

This reaches back much further than the Bush administration, however, and lobbyists and legislators have become inextricably intertwined in government, bonded together by billions of dollars and mutual owed favors.

Silverstein offers several things from his book:  1) An explanation of how lobbying firms work and how they curry favor with the government 2) A history of how such activities come to be and, most fascinating, 3)an expose.  He infiltrates two very prestigious Washington, D.C. international lobbying firms, pretending to be a shadowy proxy company, The Maldon Group, which has geopolitical interests in Turkmenistan, a government renowned for its brutality. His goal is to get the groups to lobby and create favor for positive trade relations between Turkmenistan and the United States, without having the groups ask too many questions.

Some of my favorite descriptions of Turkmenistan by Silverstein, who clearly has done meticulous research in planning this book, are those of its past psycho dictator, Sapurmarat Niyazov:

When he was crowned as President-for-Life, Niyazov was presented with a white robe and a palm staff, traditional symbols of the Prophet Mohammed.  Not long afterward, he declared himself a “national prophet…

To spread his own pearls of personal and spiritual wsdom, Niyazov penned the Ruhnama, which was described on its official website as being “on par with the Bible and the Koran.”  Ruhnama is the veil of the Turkmen people’s face and soul, wrote Niyazov in the first chapter…..September was renamed Ruhnama under the Turkmenbashi, and Saturday was renamed the Day of the Mind, and henceforth was devoted to reading his masterwork.

What’s worse is that, aside from these comic incidents, Niyazov pretty much killed a bunch of people and made his personality cult worse than anything Stalin could have concocted.

Silverstein goes on to say that he would be able to pay $10 million, which gets him not only enormous exposure to Congressmen, who, plied by lobbying firm favors, would be more willing to also promote Turkmenistan, but to think tanks and jorunalists who might promote Turkmenistan in favorable, clearly-biased articles, purchased by money that goes around and around in government.

I’ll ruin the end for you and say that two lobbying firms agreed to represent him in his mission to bring Turkmenistan into a positive light, but the process of going through to research firms and how they prop up rouge governments is what is most important in this book. It’s a book that, like Confessions of an Economic Hitman, really opened my eyes to the way international wheeling and dealing, and the fact that those who lobby for dictatorial regimes justify their actions by saying they are no worse than lawyers who represent clients that may be guilty.

The Washington Post recently had a great article on reverse immigration, where immigrants to the United States go back to their home countries because of the hectic pace of life.  I wouldn’t call Africa the promise land, mostly because I am kind of scared of the HIV.  Also, I just like saying the HIV.  Even though, obviously, not everywhere in Africa has the HIV.  Only the populated parts have (the HIV).

The article states,

He wanted a healthier lifestyle for his family, less anxiety, fewer 14-hour days. So he recently traded his deluxe apartment, the pickup truck, the dishwasher and $4.99 McDonald’s combos for life in a place he considers relatively better: sub-Saharan Africa.

“Right now I’m no stress, no anxiety,” said Odhiambo, 34, relaxing in his family home in this western Kenyan city along the shores of Lake Victoria. “Think of it this way: When I was in the U.S., I was close to 300 pounds. Now, I’m like 200. The biggest thing for me was quality of life.”

It’s not certain whether Odhiambo weighs less because the quality of food in Africa is better than in the United States (a topic I lightly grazed in my recent post on Nutella,) or  because there is no food in Africa.   Either way, it seems like reverse immigration was a positive experience for this family.

Keeping up with experts in reverse immigration (and by experts, I just mean, Neo Indian, who writes about living again in India and eating mangoes at the rate of 5 per day,) I surmise that this process is close to impossible for most.

Reverse immigration is hard, mostly because of the reverse culture shock you experience that validates the saying, “You can never go home again.”  My main citations for this experience is A) My parents’ recollections of their visits to Russia versus the nostalgia they always describe about the country and B) My own experiences going back to Russia, where, in an effort to nostalgically return to the apartment building we used to live in,  I was almost bitten by wild/stray dogs.

In the spirit of thinking about going back to mother countries, here is a list of things my parents regularly announce that they would not be able to live with if they had to go back to Russia.  They play this hypothetical game quite often, as if NKVD agents are already at their door and telling them to pack their suitcases.  They are usually very gleeful and smug when they play this game.

• The constant red tape and the bribery
• The cover that all businesses have to pay to the Mafia to keep going
• The fact that I would not be able to have as many opportunities for education
• The public bathrooms
• The use of the sides of public buildings as public bathrooms

and, for my mom, the bonus round:

• the anti-Semitism

Returning is always different, but unfortunately for this economist, it’s not something that can be quantified.  It’s the different feel of a courtyard, the way the walls look smaller, and the way the food doesn’t taste as sharp.  I’ve been thinking about reverse immigration in the context of this article, and the best  way to describe, at least in terms of returning to Russia,  it is via Est/Ouest, one of my favorite movies, where a Russian emigre from Paris heeds Stalin’s call for Russians to repatriate and rebuild the mother country.  As can be expected, everyone is screwed over, and there is death.  Death is a favorite theme for Russians.   Unfortunately, this Russian death/screwing over takes place only in French in the Youtube because I couldn’t find one with English subtitles.  Apologies in advance.

One of the comments on the You Tube video is also accurate,

welcome to the motherland….Biaaach! *bang!*