Turkestan Reunion
by [John Day, $2.75]
SINCE travelers go to observe, as well as to enjoy themselves, the observations of a quick-witted girl on her first hard journey — and this was over the most difficult trade route on the globe, with its five heartbreaking passes — are a real contribution to knowledge. The sledge journey with the Russian and Kazak drivers was enough to search the heart of any lone young woman. Not only was it so viciously cold that there was good chance of perishing along the way, but they were a rough lot, and her Russian vocabulary was only what she learned on the road and from them.
Mrs. Lattimore’s observations are significant because, during that lonely trip and after she had met her husband, she was crossing a country which had never been observed in that way before. Geographers and big-game hunters and Roosevelts have reported on parts of the way, but heretofore no young American brides — in fact, no white woman — had ever done it. That in itself makes her story worth a great deal. Of course it might all have been quite worthless to us if she had been a stupid person or as bad a writer as most of the geographers, big-game hunters, and so forth, who have reported on some of these same camping grounds. But she noticed and she wrote it all with a simplicity and directness which make one realize at the end of the book that she has used the soundest sort of style. Also it is woman style, and that is precisely what we are in need of, because a keen girl can get the look of things better than most scientists. Sow her husband, Owen Lattimore, can write more vividly than perhaps any other traveler in the Far East; but his observations are quite different from Mrs. Lattimore’s, and his main purpose has never been to meet a husband and share his work. Therefore he will miss a personality, while she might possibly miss a mountain peak. As a matter of fact, I can’t make out that he or she missed anything. My legs ached after that last pass, with its stench from the corpses of pack animals the crows were peeking.
Add this book to your travel shelf, for, until Mrs. Lattimore writes of another trip, — and she is on her way out again, — you will hardly get So vivid an idea of life on the road through Mongolia, Zungaria, and Central Asia, as it looks to a humorous and courageous woman.
LANODON WARNER