Full name: The Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland

Author: Karl E. Meyer Year: 2003 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History, Non Fiction Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9781586482411 1586482416

When Charles de Gaulle learned that France's former colonies in Africa had chosen independence, the great general shrugged dismissively, "They are the dust of empire." But as Americans have learned, particles of dust from remote and seemingly medieval countries can, at great human and material cost, jam the gears of a superpower. In The Dust of Empire, Karl E. Meyer examines the present and past of the Asian heartland in a book that blends scholarship with reportage, providing fascinating detail about regions and peoples now of urgent concern to America: the five Central Asian republics, the Caspian and the Caucasus, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and long-dominant Russia. He provides the context for America's war on terrorism, for Washington's search for friends and allies in an Islamic world rife with extremism, and for the new politics of pipelines and human rights in an area richer in the former than the latter. He offers a rich and complicated tapestry of a region where empires have so often come to grief--a cautionary tale. Similar books: The Empire of the Steppes by Rene Grousset Tournament of Shadows by Karl E. Meyer Setting the East Ablaze by Peter Hopkirk Empires of the Silk Road by Christopher I. Beckwith Life along the Silk Road by Susan Whitfield The March of the Barbarians by Harold Lamb The Mongols by David Morgan The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan The Silk Road by Frances Wood 1492 by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto The Evolution of Civilizations by Carroll Quigley The Greatest Stories Never Told by Rick Beyer A Brief History of the Western World by Thomas H. Greer Foreign Devils on the Silk Road by Peter Hopkirk Dead Wake by Erik Larson One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson Six Frigates by Ian W. Toll 102 Minutes by Jim Dwyer The History of Jihad by Robert Spencer Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink