Where the West Ends: Stories from the Middle East, the Balkans, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus [Paperback]

Michael J. Totten (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 23, 2012

Prize-winning author Michael J. Totten returns with a masterpiece of travel writing and history in this journey through thirteen nations--all but two formerly communist--just beyond the edge of the West where few casual travelers venture. His work as an independent foreign correspondent takes him deep into the field beyond the sensational headlines, from his hilariously miserable road trip through the Middle East with his best friend to Iraq and around Eastern Europe to the Wild West of Albania; from the killing fields in Bosnia and Kosovo to a Romania haunted by the ghosts of its communist past; from the front lines in the Caucasus during Russia's invasion of Georgia to the otherworldly post-Soviet disasterscape in Ukraine. Where the West Ends is high-octane adventure writing at its finest and is Michael J. Totten's most entertaining work written to date.

Praise for Where the West Ends

"Hunter S. Thompson drove to Vegas while tripping: big deal. Michael J. Totten drove to Iraq on a whim and a bad tire while suffering the shuddering flu. Lucky for us, he brought back tales of bribery, bad architecture, Kurdish love, Yanks in unexpected places, and the cigarette smuggler desperate to schlep some smokes past the guys with guns. And that's just chapter one." - James Lileks, author of Falling Up the Stairs

"Of all the journalists now alive and writing in English, there are few whose reporting interests me more than Michael Totten's--in fact, none that I can think of offhand. I spent days thinking about Where the West Ends, deeply affected by the eerie melancholy it evokes and the questions it raises about the borderlands of old empires and the places people don't visit for pleasure." - Claire Berlinksi, author of Menace in Europe

"Michael J. Totten goes on road trips to where the West ends. Every good foreign corespondent should spend some time as a tourist. A higher wisdom is achieved. Reporters are insiders, but it's outsiders who get to look in. Reporters think they're exploring, but tourists know they're lost." P.J. O'Rourke, author of Holidays in Hell

"At a time when news organizations are limiting their coverage of international affairs to stay-at-home commentators, Michael J. Totten harks back to the golden age of foreign correspondence." Journalist and screenwriter Matthew Clayfield

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Michael J. Totten is an award-winning journalist and prize-winning author whose very first book, The Road to Fatima Gate, won the Washington Institute Book Prize. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic among others, and he's a contributing editor at World Affairs and City Journal. He has reported widely from the Middle East, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union, and although he lived once in Beirut, Lebanon, today he lives with his wife and two cats in Oregon.

Product Details

• Paperback: 282 pages
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (July 23, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 147518364X
• ISBN-13: 978-1475183641
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #70,596 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael J. Totten is an award-winning journalist and prize-winning author whose very first book, The Road to Fatima Gate, won the Washington Institute Book Prize.

His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic among others, and he's a contributing editor at World Affairs and City Journal. He has reported widely from the Middle East, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union, and although he lived once in Beirut, Lebanon, today he lives with his wife and two cats in Oregon.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Courage and Desolation August 5, 2012

By Asher Abrams

Format:Paperback

'Where the West Ends' is, at least superficially, a travelogue about the region straddling eastern Europe and western Asia, during the period from 2006 to 2012. The book is divided into four sections covering the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Black Sea. It's roughly the same region covered by Robert D. Kaplan about ten years earlier in Kaplan's book 'Eastward to Tartary'. But "Where the West Ends" is more personal, and it is astonishing. At times it surreally reminded me of China Mieville's novel 'The City & the City'.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Probably most of us are guilty of throwing around terms like "the West" and "the Middle East" without really thinking too hard about what they mean, or where those places begin or end. If you want to understand what "the West" is, read this book to learn where it is, and where it is not.

There is a persistent feeling of loneliness in this book. It is the loneliness of communities cut off from one another and from themselves; but it's also the loneliness of certain individuals who refuse to be confined within the communal walls that are assigned to them.

There are harrowing stories of violence and cruelty, such as Berisha's tale of the expulsion of the Albanians from Prishtina and the ravaging of Krusha e Vogel. There is Ukraine's memory of the Stalinist "hunger plague" of 1932-1933. But there are also stories of courage and kindness, and of hope.

Three themes emerged for me as I read "Where the West Ends". There is the image of the lonely liberal, surrounded by a sea of increasingly hostile and violent factions. There is the conflict between old traditionalism and new fundamentalism. And there is the improbable eruption of pro-Americanism in the strangest places.

The Serbian film writer Filip David is one of those lonely liberals; so is the half-Serbian, half-Bosnian Predag Delibasic, who takes pride in having declared himself variously a Jew, a Muslim, and a Yugoslav - and claims that nonexistent nationality to this day. Perhaps the loneliest, though, is Shpetim Mahmudi, an Albanian Sufi mystic who must watch the gradual encroachment of foreign-backed Arab islamists on the grounds of his religious compound. His story is tragic.

It also points to something important about religious conflict in the Muslim world: that the conflict is often not - as Westerners sometimes imagine - a case of Western modernity threatening to extinguish Islamic tradition. Rather, it is instead a direct attack on centuries-old, evolving religious traditions by well-armed, well-financed followers of a comparatively recent fundamentalist sect. It is ancient moderation versus newfangled fanaticism.

It should not be news that there are places in the world where America is not well liked. Serbia is one of those places, as attested by the Belgrade taxi driver's curt greeting to Totten at the beginning of chapter 2. What's a better-kept secret, though, is that there are places that are enthusiastically pro-American. "Where the West Ends" visits some of those places: Iraqi Kurdistan, Albania, Georgia, Romania.

Taken as a whole, this book presents a spectrum of individual and communal relationships: nation-states new and old, enclaves and exclaves, secessionist and occupied zones, segregated and integrated communities, and individuals struggling - with varying degrees of success - to behave with dignity and decency amid environments calculated to breed brutality.

What we're left with is an admiration of the courage it takes to succeed. The Georgians in chapter 9 have watched Russian planes burn their forests and bomb their villages. They are angry with Russia, but they do not hate Russians. And Delibasic, at the end of chapter 2, says, "I don't hate anybody" - not even the general who commanded the prison camp where he was once confined.

Still, forgiveness is sometimes born of proximity. In the course of a conversation with a Romanian researcher about that country's Communist past, Totten is reminded of a militant in another place who said, "[They] don't live here ... they live over there, so I don't have to forgive them!"

One final note: The values and traditions that we cherish in the West are by no means assured of continuance. "The West" is an abstraction that exists in space and also in time. If in the title you replace the word "where" with "when", the book is also a warning.

The book ends with an unforgettable scene of desolation. Read the book all the way to the end, to understand why the chilling final pages capture a part of Europe still haunted by many ghosts.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Totten's "must-read" book August 6, 2012

By M. Weingrad

Format:Paperback

It may seem odd to say that Where The West Ends is Michael Totten's "must-read" book, after his deservedly award-winning The Road To Fatima Gate (as well as his significant book of Iraq reportage In the Wake of the Surge). But the newest book by this talented freelance writer and foreign correspondent is simultaneously the most personally revealing and most durably universal of his three books published to date. It meditates profoundly on the ultimate stakes of all the conflicts and conflicted lands from which he has reported, from Lebanon to Iraq, from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea.

It does so while pulling back the curtain on his own life and background more revealingly than in his other books, though it is never self-indulgent. These essays at times become madcap travelogues, in which Totten (and his comrade-in-arms Sean) are like a Hunter S. Thompson and Dr. Gonzo, high not on illicit drugs but rather on a supremely American decency and curiosity regarding the world beyond Totten's native Oregon. We are treated to accounts, alternately harrowing and funny, surprising and heartbreaking, of Totten's travels through cities and places as diverse as Dubrovnik, Iraqi Kurdistan, the Ukraine, and Azerbaijan, yet which all, through conversations with intellectuals and activists, random street encounters, and Totten's detail-hungry eye, reveal volumes about the fault lines between east and west.

These lines run in often unexpected directions--anyone who is confident that he can establish fixed borders in the clash of civilizations should read this book and think again. Totten's politics are refreshingly eclectic, not doctrinaire. He is "conservative" in the sense that he does see the world as an (often lost) struggle between the forces of civilization and those of barbarity. He is "liberal" in that he finds "West" and "East" in flux and not where one would usually expect. One might adapt Solzhenitsyn's famous line to draw the moral from Totten's superb new book by saying that "The line dividing East and West cuts through the heart of every human being."

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Important history August 8, 2012

By Grahame Lynch

Format:Paperback

I've followed Michael Totten via his US magazine writing intermittently and always enjoyed his first hand accounts of conditions on the ground in Iraq. So it was a pleasant surprise when I saw he had written an entirely longform work largely based on travel throughout several former Soviet states. It's an area of the world that gets little foreign attention and Michael has shone a light on some of the fascinating nuances of the Balkans and the Caucasus - who would have thought that George Bush would be so popular among Albanian Muslims or that the Turkish side of Kurdistan is a disaster compared to the Iraqi side? Best thing about this book is the highly personal style and the centrist tone - so much writing about this topic is pitched with a political bias. I've now gone back to search out his Iraq book. Highly recommended if you want to know how societies deal with sharp dislocations and life at the coalface of the great clash between Islam, orthodox Christianity, European secularism and Communism.