This book is a bit of a slog, because you're not following individuals so much as whole tribes. But I am intrigued, because I learn something I never knew in each chapter. If you like reading instead of TV, you'll enjoy it.

This was a fantastic survey of world history that suffered from debilitating problems, as a book. On the one hand, for its content, I'd heartily recommend The Silk Roads. It's a great survey of material culture and commerce from ancient times to the present. It's global in perspective (when most similar treatments focus on western Europe). Frankopan makes a convincing case that myopic European accounts of history distort our understanding of the world. Not just the contributions and role of Indian, Chinese, Turkish, Arabic and (particularly) Persian culture; but also a myriad of other tribes and nations. The history of the world through this broader lens is fascinating in its own right. But, importantly, this distortion causes us to badly misinterpret "our" own culture (which I'll define as, loosely, Anglo, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch). Some of the most hamhanded, shortsighted, and bloody mistakes of the last hundred years or more, emerge directly from our ignorance and arrogance. None of this is a new perspective (especially if you're a linguist, say), and the outlines of this history were familiar to me, from talking with good friends, in a very international crowd: Turkey, Portugal, China and Iran, Austria and Egypt. But there's been very little history written, in English, that departs from the familiar Rome->Dark Ages-> Renaissance pattern. It's good to finally see something substantial written, that recontextualises our place in the world in a thorough and sensible way. For all of the above reasons, I'd give the book 5 stars. Similarly, Frankopan's prose is excellent, and deserving of 5 stars, as is his thorough documentation and extensive bibliography. His coverage of several periods of history was exciting. However, the book was almost unreadable for long stretches. It contained too many details, laid out in rapid succession, with too little discussion. Paragraph after paragraph of names, and dates, and unadorned details. It was a brisk, high altitude flight across 2000 years of history, of about 30 different nations and 12000 or more miles of territory, with no time to catch your breath. The chapters individually were sensibly written around an approximate theme. Each chapter, individually, might be a good resource for several hours of a seminar course, where you could spend some time digging into the material and discussing. But one after another, the effect was numbing. I really feel like this should have been 4 separate books, and Frankopan should have taken twice as many pages to cover the same amount of material. There is really no conceivable reason why anyone would need to cover Ancient Rome, classic Persia, China, and India; the conquest of the Americas; the 19th century through the Second World war; and finally the Cold War through the Iraq war (focusing on all the meddling we did in the Middle East)---all in a single book. The general premise, that central Asia and the Middle East, by linking East and West, were important historically, and will probably be important again, is too weak to hold the whole thing together. It was frustrating. There were beautiful moments of clarity, but they got lost in the torrent. The overtly political agenda, mainly evident in the last couple chapters and afterword, detracted from the historicity (and it's not that I disagree with Frankopan's politics, but when I want to listen to Chomsky, I do), and felt like a distraction from what was otherwise a great story of the importance of trade, material culture, and cultural transmission. I got the feeling that the political tale was meant to be the unifying thread, but again this was only clear in the last couple chapters, and it wasn't enough to hold the book together. Nor was the central conceit of saying "the silk roads" occasionally.

Comprehensive thoroughly documented accounting of the rich human history that linked East and West. This segment of human interactions, mostly ignored , is a lively revelation of the thousands of connections travelers have experienced and subsequently integrated into our Mediterranean and central Asian cultures. I dearly wish this component of world history had been regularly taught in my younger scholarly experience. A great read!

Every politician should read this cause and effect book!

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.

I appreciate the new perspective on history from a different hemisphere. It was an engaging and thought provoking read that was worth the time.

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.

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