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Silk Roads Paperback – January 1, 2016

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 9,013 ratings

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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; 1st edition (January 1, 2016)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 636 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1408839997
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1408839997
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.04 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.04 x 1.32 x 7.8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 9,013 ratings

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Peter Frankopan
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4.5 out of 5 stars
9,013 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book provides profound historical insights and a lively overview of events. They describe it as an enjoyable read with compelling language. The writing style is described as readable and clear. Many readers appreciate the eye-opening perspective and well-rounded view of the world at a given time. The book provides a global perspective on the Middle East, Asia minor, and Central Asia regions. However, some customers feel the pacing is uneven.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

353 customers mention "Information quality"317 positive36 negative

Customers find the book provides a comprehensive overview of historical events and connections between East and West. They appreciate its thorough coverage of topics that are often overlooked. The book is well-written and researched, providing useful background for understanding the events. Overall, readers describe it as an engaging and thought-provoking history of central Asia.

"...This does not detracted from the text and information imparted. The writing style flows well and is easy to read and follow...." Read more

"...and the author of THE SILK ROADS, has a prodigiously profound insight on historical events and is an extraordinarily hard-working researcher which..." Read more

"This text is well written and well researched. Not sure what bias one of the lengthy one star reviews is talking about...." Read more

"An ambitious history spanning several thousand years, this book is easy to read and takes you through a part of the world we Americans either don’t..." Read more

251 customers mention "Readability"225 positive26 negative

Customers find the book engaging and worth reading. They appreciate the first 15 chapters, which provide an interesting history of the in-between world. The book is described as a good resource for seminar courses.

"...I’m looking forward to the remainder of this enjoyable journey." Read more

"...He pulled multiple strands together in this single great work. An epic story indeed! Incredibly informative and compellingly attractive...." Read more

"...it was Chinese silk that named these roads but overall this was a fascinating read...." Read more

"...A really fantastic book, especially if you want a detailed account from ancient to current times." Read more

155 customers mention "Writing quality"122 positive33 negative

Customers find the book well-written and engaging. They appreciate the author's clear introduction to his approach and the concise yet detailed account of history. The book is a pleasure to read, providing new insights into the Eastern world.

"...The writing style flows well and is easy to read and follow. I’m looking forward to the remainder of this enjoyable journey." Read more

"This text is well written and well researched. Not sure what bias one of the lengthy one star reviews is talking about...." Read more

"An ambitious history spanning several thousand years, this book is easy to read and takes you through a part of the world we Americans either don’t..." Read more

"Great book by an outstanding author.Absolutly best book on the silk roads,love it.Very well researched a true encyclopedia of knowledge." Read more

32 customers mention "Eye-opening"32 positive0 negative

Customers find the book insightful and educational. They appreciate its well-rounded view of the world at a given time, with characters and events updated to modern times. The book provides a powerful perspective on the forces that give rise to difficult problems. It reimagines the center of the world and the origin of history as being in a wheat field.

"...that were devised, implemented and set down centuries ago was a real eye opener...." Read more

"...Now, after reading this book from beginning to end, highlighting and underlining sentences, making notes in the margins, I feel my heart ten times..." Read more

"...That gave some great perspective to this book and is recommended for anyone who read SILK ROADS." Read more

"...It was frustrating. There were beautiful moments of clarity, but they got lost in the torrent...." Read more

15 customers mention "Focusing"11 positive4 negative

Customers appreciate the book's global perspective and the key role played by the region between East and West. They find it comprehensive, covering the Middle East, Asia minor, and Central Asia. The book shows how ideas and things went from East to West, as well as the re-emergence of the East. It also takes a balanced global approach, rather than the euro, and explores the rich human history that linked East and West.

"...thoroughly documented accounting of the rich human history that linked East and West...." Read more

"...It's global in perspective (when most similar treatments focus on western Europe)...." Read more

"...Frankopan’s main thesis is that the region stretching from the Mediterranean to China, and particularly the region that is now Iraq, Iran, and..." Read more

"...Maybe I am missing something but this is still a Western-centric view, centered on Byzantium and medieval Europe...." Read more

14 customers mention "Look"10 positive4 negative

Customers find the book's appearance interesting and well-done. They say it provides a good overview of various parts of the world and their major people.

"...An epic story indeed! Incredibly informative and compellingly attractive. This ambitious book spans centries, continents and cultures...." Read more

"...do a bunch about history it’s analysis of parts of the world are beautifully done and the reference egg bakes it just that much more interesting the..." Read more

"...Salt is not specified. Fashion and textiles are barely mentioned, and appear in the chapter, The Road of Death and Destruction...." Read more

"...In addition the author writes in a very readable and enjoyable style...." Read more

18 customers mention "Pacing"9 positive9 negative

Customers have different views on the pacing of the book. Some find it interesting and fast-paced, with a movement that makes it informative and provocative. Others feel bored, overwhelmed, and frustrated with repetitive sections and chapters that are difficult to get through.

"...Wonderful and entertaining prose that moves the material quite fast and thus probably stays on the surface a bit, but that's ok...." Read more

"...It was frustrating. There were beautiful moments of clarity, but they got lost in the torrent...." Read more

"...I can say that it is fascinating, troubling (humans are a warring, power hungry species), and humbling. It is not however an easy read...." Read more

"...definitely not something I read quickly; there were chapters I found difficult to get through - but the whole theme of the Silk Roads brings..." Read more

13 customers mention "Broad scope"9 positive4 negative

Customers find the book has a wide range of topics and covers many different subjects. They appreciate the breadth of the viewpoint and the ambitious coverage of various topics that are not reported in the news. However, some readers find the place names unfamiliar and the lack of maps confusing.

"...Incredibly informative and compellingly attractive. This ambitious book spans centries, continents and cultures...." Read more

"Expansive and informative for all who have not had the privilege of Central Asian travel, this book leaves me with some anguish...." Read more

"...history book- it is still fact filled, name filled and covers a dizzying array of place names that are not familiar...." Read more

"...serious history buff but my eyes have been opened with this new breadth of viewpoint and fascinating insights...." Read more

A Truly Impressive and Great Book
5 out of 5 stars
A Truly Impressive and Great Book
Both eye-opening and delightfully educational. The thorough and endless research stunned me.A wonderful, amazing book of cultural, social, economic and political history. It reset my "poles".Steve Schulte MPHLos Angeles
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2016
    I don’t know how you enjoy reading your books, but unlike the page-turners that can’t be put down, if a book grabs my attention, I tend to slow down my pace to absorb as much as possible of the full meaning that the author intends to impart.

    At 10% this book had me hooked. The realisation of how our present way of life is just a continuation of societal systems, laws and principles that were devised, implemented and set down centuries ago was a real eye opener.
    I am now at around 60% and continue to be enthralled at how heavily the historical background impacts on almost every important current event and crisis that we encounter today and how different the impressions and mental pictures that emerge from the book are to those portrayed and imparted by our media.

    If you are interested in why the world is what it is today, you cannot get a better more interesting precis of what events caused us to reach the state of current global development and you will better understand (but not justify) the unrest in which we live.

    Staring from Roman days BC, the first 16 chapters (aprox 40% of the book) take you on an evolutionary trip through the major events, century by century, giving a foundation on how and why events of exploitation and slavery evolved as they did.
    From Chapter 17 the author brings you into the 20th Century and shows how major political self-serving manipulations and greed have resulted in the unavoidable conflicts of wars and aggression throughout the history of the East and the West.

    The reader cannot help but link the global terrorist activities and the peaceful invasion of Europe that we are witnessing to a resurgence of tactics and methods used throughout history to justify reaction against perceived sins that the West committed or imposed on weaker nations, which they "colonised" then simply took (or stole) their mineral, human and oil resources with no regard to the consequences on the local population and with little respect, pay-back or recompense (other than selective and ridiculous bribing of officials) to the masses of humans that they exploited, betrayed and decimated over centuries.

    From the outset, the author explains why he elected to use the historical names of the people and places he describes and this becomes distracting to the reader who eventually loses track of exactly who or where the event occurs because (except for a few cases) he does not give the up-to-date name of the location or person, despite his giving the actual source references on which he bases his commentary. However, as the text gives the general location and position of an individual, readers can ignore the foreign nomenclatures and read on. This does not detracted from the text and information imparted.

    The writing style flows well and is easy to read and follow. I’m looking forward to the remainder of this enjoyable journey.
    17 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2017
    THE SILK ROADS by Peter Frankopan
    A New History Of The World

    It's true to say that history is a story told by the winner. It's all very well to get a big head and wield a sword as a now victor; but it's of pivotal importance to remember that forces on the other side or on the periphery would be flexing their muscles, on the alert for a chance to settle scores.

    Peter Frankopan, a historian based at Oxford University and the author of THE SILK ROADS, has a prodigiously profound insight on historical events and is an extraordinarily hard-working researcher which we know from 100 pages of notes and bibliography accompanying 507 pages of text. This book is something none other than Peter himself couldn't have written. He pulled multiple strands together in this single great work. An epic story indeed! Incredibly informative and compellingly attractive. This ambitious book spans centries, continents and cultures. It shows a historical tapestry woven with his epochal perspective: how cultures, slaves, products, natural resources, religions and ways of life have been traded for over two thousand years; how the center of powers has changed so far and which it's heading into.

    This book takes the form of a series of what marked milestones in global history chronologically arranged from ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia to the Crusades to the post ww2 era to the recent consideration of Turkey joining the SCO not the EU to the present when half-a-mile-long trains carrying millions of products from China to Germany in just sixteen days and vice versa. It of course includes factual accounts of events with the additional explanations on the causality between some nitty-gritty issues. But what the author is really willing to give is a warning against solving today's problems without worrying tomorrow's. THE SILK ROADS enables us all who read it to see a broad region that had been or is in turmoil. It reveals the dangers of the lack of perspective about global history. Great turning points in human history, I've learned from this book, have been bound together by, against the backdrop of, many big and small talks and decisions which occurred in the barren steppes, in conference rooms, on the phone and sometimes in a prison cell.

    I owe much to Peter Frankopan. My knowledge of the world history was admittedly sparse. When it comes to history related literature, I, as a person who had no interest in the stuff of global history, have only read several books focusing on a narrow subject matter over shortening timeframesㅡUNBROKEN, ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, DEAD WAKE, just to name a few. Now, after reading this book from beginning to end, highlighting and underlining sentences, making notes in the margins, I feel my heart ten times more fluttering than when I first saw the jacket image of an incredibly beautiful decorative ceiling of a certain madrasah in Uzbekistan. There is a greater quiver of excitement now in my mind than there was just after reading 7-page preface which made me all aflutter in anticipation of the following text.

    The bottom line: go online with your smart phone to do a search for THE SILK ROADS by Peter Frankopan, add it to cart and proceed to checkout! Some time later you would take a few stride forward to the reality of how the world works.
    34 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2022
    This text is well written and well researched. Not sure what bias one of the lengthy one star reviews is talking about. Not going to get into a refutation of those complaints. What needs to be recognized here is that the focus on Europe in a history about trade routes that didn’t include Europe for quite a while is suspicious and yet this is a much better perspective than A PEOPLES HISTORY OF THE WORLD which couldn’t get out of Europe no matter how hard it tried.

    I think the most impressive section is the one covering the 20th century where the author manages to weave together a number of various disasters caused mostly by the British, Russians, and Americans (as well as Iran and Iraq with the help of said Europeans).

    I felt that the absence of China in various points was odd since it was Chinese silk that named these roads but overall this was a fascinating read.

    I followed this up with DESTINY DISRUPTED which is a history of the world from the perspective of Islam. That gave some great perspective to this book and is recommended for anyone who read SILK ROADS.
    35 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2024
    An ambitious history spanning several thousand years, this book is easy to read and takes you through a part of the world we Americans either don’t think about much, or when we do, only in a negative sense. A good portion of the second half of the book focuses on Western meddling in the old Silk Road nations of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, explaining how Americans and the British have created resentment and instability in the region since the colonial days. A really fantastic book, especially if you want a detailed account from ancient to current times.
    13 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Daniel
    5.0 out of 5 stars excellent book
    Reviewed in Canada on August 4, 2024
    Lots of detail going back to beginnings of recorded history. I can't remember all the details but it's a pleasure to read them all. It focuses a lot on the world east of Western Europe, something we don't learn about in school. For much of history Western Europe was a backwater while the real action happened in the Middle East and Asia. Carries right on to modern times and provides a powerful new perspective that has opened my eyes. For one thing, the author carefully outlines how both world wars were driven by the great powers' desire to control the flow of oil. Makes our Western Europe-centred view seem so inadequate.
  • Donita
    5.0 out of 5 stars The Silk Roads
    Reviewed in Mexico on February 22, 2024
    Se me hizo muy interesante. Me encanta la Historia.

    No he podido comprar el libro en Kindle, no sé porque, solo tengo el sample.
  • Fernando
    5.0 out of 5 stars Muito enriquecedor
    Reviewed in Brazil on July 1, 2022
    Um livro longo e detalhista, requer muita paciência. Li em partes ao longo de vários meses. Muito interessante e bem escrito.
  • Kushagra Kumar
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Experience !
    Reviewed in India on August 26, 2024
    Very comprehensive and informative. Offers a fresh take on world history and the capricious nature of global relations. Enjoyed it thoroughly !
  • I. Jones
    5.0 out of 5 stars Superb book for understanding the world we live in
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2020
    This book has been around for four or five years now, but it looks like I read it at just the right time, given current events in Iran (as of early January 2020).
    It claims to be a new history of the world. That’s a bit grandiose, but it certainly is an alternative way of looking at world history over the last two or three thousand years. For the most part, because although the author strives to avoid being Eurocentric, there are times when he just can’t help it, given the role that Europe – and its empires – have played in world history, particularly over the last five hundred years.
    I have to say that the opening is not very promising. Roman history is clearly not the author’s forte and he skates over the Roman conquest of Egypt and the defeat of Cleopatra in a pretty perfunctory and not entirely accurate way. However, from then on the book gets much better. This is not so much original research as original thinking and a meticulous synthesis of what we know and what we don’t know about the history of central Asia, or specifically the corridor from Turkey to the Himalayas. Some of this is familiar – the rise of Islam, the Crusades, the Mongols, Timur Lang – but the beauty of this book is the fine detail that the author adds and the connections he makes between events and places that don’t immediately appear to be connected. I could give dozens of examples, but one striking one is the discovery of Roman coins deep in India. Another is the way Buddhism had to jazz itself up to make itself more appealing to people who wanted temples, rituals and statues. Similarly we hear of a 4th century bishop complaining that Jewish services are far more entertaining than Christian ones because they have music and dancing, tambourines and cymbals, and we’ve got to raise our game if we’re going to compete for market share.
    There is another apparent blip when the author switches to Columbus, Portugal and Spain and the “discovery” of the Americas. It seems like a digression till you realise that 1492 did shift the centre of gravity temporarily from central Asia to central America; or in Eurocentric terms from Venice to Lisbon and Seville. It also opened up new trade routes between East and West (and made those terms largely meaningless once the globe had been circumnavigated).
    As the book moves closer to the twenty-first century, we get new insights into where we are now, such as the rise of China and Iran’s role as a regional power. For example, I was familiar with British nineteenth century Russophobia and the “great game” which largely involved using Afghanistan as a buffer to prevent the Russians from attacking British-ruled India. However, I was very hazy about British involvement in Persia and this book taught me a lot about why the Iranians are so hostile towards us westerners, especially the US and Britain. Whether you agree with the author’s analysis or not, it seems incontestable that much of our intervention in central Asia over the last two hundred or more years has been a concoction of short-termism and naked self-interest mixed with large doses of hypocrisy and double standards, all served up with a thick white supremacist sauce. For example, consider the games the US played during the first Gulf War between Iraq and Iran. First they backed Saddam Hussein of course; but by the mid-eighties the US was not only supplying conventional weapons to Iran; they were also providing the capability for Iran to develop nuclear weapons – and other western countries were falling over themselves to get a slice of the pie. Seems ironic now that Trump is threatening Iran with World War III. NB the author focuses on the role of one Dick Cheney, both in the 1980s as a supplier of arms and nuclear technology and more recently as someone who wants to see the Iranian nuclear programme – that he enabled – blown to dust.
    All in all this is a superb book for understanding the world we live in now and I Iook forward to reading the sequel shortly.
    One person found this helpful
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