Publisher's Weekly on Silk Road to Ruin

Publisher's Weekly, or more precisely Publisher's Weekly Comics Week, has published an interview with me about my upcoming book SILK ROAD TO RUIN: IS CENTRAL ASIA THE NEW MIDDLE EAST? (NBM Publishing, 304 pp., $22.95 Hardback, August 2006).

Some highlights:

Ted Rall's Central Asian Adventure
By Sarah Feightner

Syndicated cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall has made a career out of a take-no-prisoners brand of political satire, taking shots from the extreme left wing at such controversial targets as the 9/11 widows and Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book legend Art Spiegelman. With his new book, Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?, coming in August from NBM, Rall hopes to convince readers to care about everyday life and politics in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and a handful of former Soviet republics that the average U.S. citizen probably couldn't find on a map.

"This will either be a disaster, or the smartest thing I've ever done," Rall says with a grin.

Four years in the making and launching with a 10,000-copy hardcover first printing, this new work of comics nonfiction picks up where his acclaimed 2002 war memoir To Afghanistan and Back (NBM) left off, mixing Rall's political commentary with a comic travelogue pieced together from numerous trips to the region between 1999 and 2002. Silk Road to Ruin is an eye-opening and unexpectedly funny introduction to Central Asia. Each section explores the political and cultural landscape of one of "The Stans," as Rall flies, drives or bribes his way across the border. Highlights include a tour of Third World cuisine, oil pipeline politics and the ultraviolent regional sport buzkashii—"the bloodiest and most anarchic sport currently played by the human race"—in which men on horseback duke it out, sometimes to the death, over the body of a dead goat.

"It's very much the book that I wanted to write instead of To Afghanistan and Back," says Rall. "I wanted to show that this war in Afghanistan was part of a much bigger thing that 9/11 triggered but really wasn't the cause of it."

[...]

While there may be more qualified scholars, better artists and more balanced political commentators out there than Rall, no one else has put together an introduction to Central Asia with as much accessibility, humor and guts as Silk Road to Ruin.

And it's hard to match Rall's enthusiasm for the subject. "I want to popularize Central Asia," he says. "I want to do for Central Asia what Julia Child did for cooking."