Some of the most readable and gripping non-fiction books are historical works of what the French call haute vulgarisation, high-class popularization. They should be written like a novel, with a compelling tale replete with colorful personalities; the better of them uncover sources so obscure that they verge on original research; the best of them offer new interpretations. Writers who fit this description Alan Morehead, Leonard Cottrell, and Donald R. Morris. Central Asia has more than its share of such authors, including René Grousset, J.J. Saunders, and Peter Hopkirk.
But no one does it better than Meyer and Byrsac (a married couple, he of The New York Times, she of CBS Reports). They write fluently, offer a synoptic view, tell a dazzling tale, and even offer some new ideas. Their topic is the Russian-British rivalry in the vast region from (in today's terms) Kazakstan to western China, the center of Asia, an area of no ports but the world's highest peaks and most scorching deserts. They date this rivalry (the "Great Game") to an obscure moment in 1812 when a British veterinarian searching Tibet for a better breeds of horses encountered evidence of the Russians having been there first. In a sense, the Great Game ended with the collapse of the tsarist regime just over a century later; but in another sense, it was picked up the Soviet Union; and when the British left India in 1947, their position was picked up by the Indian and American governments; in ways, "the Game was a Victorian prologue to the Cold War." Only with the collapse of the Soviet Union can this nearly-two-century really rivalry have been said to have ended.
The authors put most of their effort into recounting a great tale, but they also draw two general conclusions. First, that a persistent contrast existed between the "courage and brilliance" of the young men in the field, on both sides, and the "feckless irresponsibility" of their older superiors. Second, in the words of one participant (H.V. Hodson) looking back on the whole thing, "the Game really was a game, with scores but no substantive prizes." Unlike the Cold War, the stakes there were more imaginary than real; for all of Russia's successes in Central Asia, both imperial and Soviet Russia collapsed and the country has nothing to show for all that effort.
