Me, Interviewed

Jamie Weinstein at The Daily Caller interviewed me about Egypt, Iran, and my new book Where the West Ends. You can read the whole thing over there, but here’s part of it.

Getting to your new book, “Where the West Ends,” what compelled you to write it?  

I didn’t plan on writing and publishing “Where the West Ends” until I had already completed all the field work that went into it. I realized two years ago that I had spent a great deal of time on the part of our planet between Turkey and Russia, and between the Balkans and the Caucasus, where Western Civilization blends with Russian and Islamic civilizations. It’s an absolutely fascinating part of the world, both familiar and exotic at the same time. When it dawned on me that I had a whole book’s worth of material from there, I knew at once that “Where the West Ends” would, in fact, become a book.

Where does the West end? And how do you define the West?

I think of the West as all the world’s nations that are the children of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, but it’s debatable, and even that straightforward definition crashes into the rocks east of Greece. Russia, for instance, is a bastard child of the Roman Empire, but is it Western? It sort of is, but it’s also the bastard child of medieval-era despotism from the far East. And what about Turkey? Its largest city was once the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, but it was conquered from Asia and today it’s Islamic.

And what about Israel? It’s either part of the West or similar to the West. There’s a debate there that will never end. Let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that it’s Western. If so, the separation barrier between Israel and the West Bank may be the only place on earth where Western civilization suddenly stops and another — in this case, Arab civilization — abruptly begins. Everywhere else, the West falls away in degrees.

North America’s Pacific Rim is the western edge of the West. In the east, the West fades slowly like twilight.

What do you hope readers get from your book?

First and foremost, I want readers to be entertained. This book was certainly the most fun of my three books to write. I want people to ride along with me as I explore near — yet strange — parts of the world that hardly anyone ever visits on holiday: Places like the wrecked parts of the former Soviet Union. “Where the West Ends” is basically a literary road trip. If you’re looking for a dull information dump, read something else. And the last thing anyone should expect from me this time around is policy analysis.

The first 50 or so pages is about the craziest thing I’ve ever done in my life, when I took a road trip to Iraq on a lark from Istanbul without any planning. My best friend, Sean LaFreniere, and I rented a car so we could visit the ruins of the ancient city of Troy, and we decided, what the hell, Iraq is only 1,000 miles away, let’s go there instead. We didn’t have nearly enough time to do it properly, so we decided to just drive there for lunch and come back as quickly as possible.

It was the most excruciating and trouble-plagued trip I’ve ever taken. Everything went wrong. Everything. That journey was unrelentingly miserable, but I’ve never had so much fun as a writer as I did when I told that story in print. It brought to mind a quote by the great travel writer Tim Cahill: “An adventure,” he wrote, “is never an adventure when it happens. An adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.”

I also went to Georgia when Russia invaded, and I drove behind Russian lines with a bad-ass dude named Thomas Goltz. He’s a professor in rural Montana, but he looks like a biker with his shaved head and his whisk broom moustache. He lived in Chechnya and wrote a first-person narrative account of the apocalyptic war with the Russians.

Sean and I also drove through blasted-up Bosnia, the Wild West of Albania, and through the post-Soviet disasterscape in Ukraine on a botched journey to the radioactive wasteland around Chernobyl. That was another trip where absolutely everything went off the rails, partly because we were totally unprepared, and also because a road trip through Ukraine from Poland is much more difficult than it sounds — or at least it was when we did it a couple of years ago.

With the exception of Iraqi Kurdistan, none of the destinations in this book are part of my regular beat. I visited 13 countries, and all but two are formerly communist. If I have expertise anywhere, it’s the Middle East — not Eastern Europe, Western Asia or the former Soviet bloc. This was mostly just a fun book to write. It’s hopefully a fun book to read.

And it’s devoid of partisan political commentary — with one exception. I went to places in the former Soviet Union that no tourists visit for pleasure, and I was shocked at how ruined some of those places still are. If anything, these journeys made me more of an anti-communist than I already was, and I’m sure that comes across in the book.

Why do you do what you do? Is it pure adventurism, as you intimate in the book, or something deeper?

A huge part of it is pure adventure. Sean and I have been wondering lately about how we can ever top our on-a-lark road trip to Iraq for lunch. The only thing we’ve been able to come up with is to drive to Afghanistan, for breakfast, from Hong Kong.

I do this sort of thing because I write for a living and traveling gives me material, but there’s something else, too — something deep inside that drives me. Partly, it’s because I want to see the world, and I quickly get bored visiting places tourists like to go (though I wouldn’t say no if someone offers me plane tickets to Paris); partly, because visiting the broken parts of the world makes me appreciate more what we have in the United States.; partly, it’s a way to ward off boredom and torpor.

There’s also something else — something I can’t explain — that’s just wired into my personality. My brother also likes to take trips like this and he doesn’t write for a living. Our parents didn’t raise us to be travelers — they hardly took us anywhere — but both of us turned out like this anyway. In another era, he and I would have explored parts of our planet that no one has ever seen.

Read the whole thing at The Daily Caller.

And you can pick up a copy of my own new book, Where the West Ends, in both trade paperback
and electronic formats.