Customer Reviews

Silk Road: Monks, Warriors & Merchants

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a fantastic cultural adventure and should be read by anyone interested in cross-cultural relationships. More than a topographical description of the silk road, it is a gallop though history explaining paths taken by silk to get to Europe. It starts in prehistoric china and ends with the Karakorum highway, synthetizing in twenty chapters the reasons for the often difficult diffusion of luxury products from the Far East. The author, that evidently knows well chinese history and mentality, takes us by hand into the ancient cinese political issues as to foreign commerce, the fundamental role played by Iranians, byzantines and arabs during the Middle Ages up to the wary reciprocal opening of European and Cinese worlds due to brave and curious travelers. So we meet princesses, monks and merchants and get to know their fascinanting stories. One point of force of the book is the meticulous and modern analysis of these travel tales, so we have a critical perspective of what has come down in history and makes up our cultural background. Marco Polo get's revisited and also less well known ancient and modern travelers are cited.
Boulnois loves silk (her detailed description of materials of the old world and how they were made is enlightening)and its history, so she brings us to her country, France, and to the evolution of the silk industry in the XIX and XX century. And this somehow closes the circle of the story of this precious tissue that reached its apogeum in the last century.
The book however is much more than this and carries a great amount of information. It could be described actually as a textbook on the history of silk. It is well written even if not too easy to read, and sometimes it is a little repetitive.
I enjoyed it very much and feel enriched by its reading.

This book is interesting to the general reader but it is very hard to use in a classroom setting. There are many repetitions, too many different names for the students to remember and very little linear thinking. Sometime the author will loose herself in the lengthy description of a particular textile, or dye or mineral, and forget about the general line of thought that she was pursuing. Shea also often will put two or three topics that have little to do with each other in the same chapter. A wide-ranging and impressive knowledge of the subject but quite disappointing as a teaching tool.

This is the book I wish I had written. I have traveled in most of these countries and studied their history and culture. I was so thrilled to see the information pulled together and the follow-through to show the outcomes of movements and trade goods. Fascinating. Loved it!!

As an American Classics major, I have a nodding acquaintance with old Europe. Put me in Central Asia and it's time for misery and confusion. Who ARE all these people? They have names that rhyme. And the history is so long. Greece, Rome, maybe seven hundred years apiece, it's over.
Luce Boulnois, in what I suspect is an excellent translation (still has the verbal zing of a French speaker, but none of the awkwardness of a word-by-word transcription), manages to makes this long term overview sympathetic. It's not like being hammered with a string of weird names. She tells relevant episodes among well-defined characters, beginning with the Romans and the Parthians, flashing back to the earlier history of silk cultivation among the early parts of what would become the Empire of China. The reader gains some understanding of the methods and difficulties of raising very fussy, ravenous caterpillars, and the way these methods diffused into the west. I liked the earlier parts with the more colorful characters better, but even I was interested in the collapse of China's leadership and the rise of the west (it's short and pithy).

I would have liked more maps, in the beginning; I greatly enjoyed the color photos, and if I should ever be inclined to travel east, I suspect the list of Silk Road-related museums would be invaluable.

This is a fascinating coverage of a area, region call it what you may. The Silk Road has been part of the adventure stories that we have come across over many years, not knowing much about it; but we have thought that one day we might just get there ourselves.

Purchased with the idea that if I am going to visit this area, and I will in the not too distant future, this is the ideal book to read, savior and be intrigued with the Monks Warriors & Merchants that have gone before us.

If only I could pronounce the names - but then that is another book, another read.

A very good introduction to the Silk Roads. This book was thoroughly written and contains everything I ever wanted to know about the Silk Roads. It is a very engaging read. The only downside is that sources are not cited, and there are many snippets of information which could not be verified by outside sources.

Got to me in a decent enough time and nothing was wrong with the book so i would say overall pretty good.