The Great Game
1990 · 565 pages
Britain and Russia crept toward each other across Central Asia until two thousand miles between them became twenty. Hopkirk tells it through the officers who rode alone into Bukhara, Khiva, and Kabul.
★ 6.4
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Empire of the Steppes
A History of Central Asia
1939 · 687 pages
Wave after wave of horsemen out of the grasslands, breaking settled empires from China to Hungary. Grousset made Attila, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane one continuous history running from the Scythians to 1757.
★ 5.9
The Silk Roads
A New History of the World
2015 · 672 pages
Europe was a latecomer and a backwater, Frankopan argues: across two millennia wealth, faith and plague traveled the roads between Persia and China, and he sees the world's center moving back.
★ 5.7