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A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (Travel Literature) |  | Author: Eric Newby
Publisher: Lonely Planet
List Price: $14.99
Buy New: $8.63
as of 11/23/2009 00:05 CST details
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Seller: smokymtnbooks
Rating:  32 reviews
Sales Rank: 38514
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 4.9 x 0.7
ISBN: 1741795281
Dewey Decimal Number: 910
EAN: 9781741795288
ASIN: 1741795281
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
For more than a decade following the end of World War II, Eric Newby toiled away in the British fashion industry, peddling some of the ugliest clothes on the planet. (Regarding one wafer-thin model in her runway best, he was reminded of "those flagpoles they put up in the Mall when the Queen comes home.") Fortunately, Newby reached the end his haute-couture tether in 1956. At that point, with the sort of sublime impulsiveness that's forbidden to fictional characters but endemic to real ones, he decided to visit a remote corner of Afghanistan, where no Englishman had planted his brogans for at least 50 years. What's more, he recorded his adventure in a classic narrative, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. The title, of course, is a fine example of Newby's habitual self-effacement, since his journey--which included a near-ascent of the 19,800-foot Mir Samir--was anything but short. And his book seems to furnish a missing link between the great Britannic wanderers of the Victorian era and such contemporary jungle nuts as Redmond O'Hanlon. At times it also brings to mind Evelyn Waugh, who contributed the preface. Newby is a less acidulous writer, to be sure, and he has little interest in launching the sort of heat-seeking satiric missiles that were Waugh's specialty. Still, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is a hilarious read. The author excels at the dispiriting snapshot, capturing, say, the Afghan backwater of Fariman in two crisp sentences: "A whole gale of wind was blowing, tearing up the surface of the main street. Except for two policemen holding hands and a dog whose hind legs were paralysed it was deserted." His capsule history of Nuristan also gets in some sly digs at Britain's special relationship with the violence-prone Abdur Rahman: Officially his subsidy had just been increased from 12,000 to 16,000 lakhs of rupees. To the British he had fully justified their selection of him as Amir of Afghanistan and, apart from the few foibles remarked by Lord Curzon, like flaying people alive who displeased him, blowing them from the mouths of cannon, or standing them up to the neck in pools of water on the summits of high mountains and letting them freeze solid, he had done nothing to which exception could be taken. Newby also surpasses Waugh--and indeed, most other travel writers--in another important respect: he's miraculously free of solipsism. Even the keenest literary voyagers tend to be, in the purest sense of the term, self-centered. But A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush includes wonderfully oblique portraits of the author's travel companion, Hugh Carless, and his wife, Wanda (who plays a starring role in such subsequent chronicles as Slowly down the Ganges). There are also dozens of brilliant cameo parts, and an indelible record of a stunning landscape. The roof of the world is, in Newby's rendering, both an absolute heaven and a low-oxygen hell. Yet the author never pretends to pit himself against a malicious Nature--his mountains are, in Frost's memorable phrase, too lofty and original to rage. Which is yet another reason to call this little masterpiece a peak performance. --James Marcus
Product Description
The view was colossal. Below us on every side mountain surged away it seemed forever; we looked down on glaciers and snow-covered peaks that perhaps no one has ever seen before, except from the air.'
Feeling restless in the world of London's high-fashion industry, Eric Newby asked a friend to accompany him on a mountain-climbing expedition in the wild and remote Hindu Kush, in north-eastern Afghanistan. And so they went - although they did stop first for four days of climbing lessons in Wales - becoming the first Englishmen to visit this spectacular region for more than half a century. Newby's frank and funny account of their expedition to what is still amongst the world's most isolated areas is one of the classics of travel writing.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 32
 Not much has changed in 50 years June 17, 2009
A. N. Lush (Rhode Island)
A thoroughly enjoyable book from a Brit who always had room for adventure. (Read "The Last Grain Race" for Newby's adventures as a teen sailing a traditional working sailing ship around the world.)
Most interesting to me was seeing how little has changed in the subsequent 50 years. Afghanistan remains today just as tribal, just as inaccessible, just as rugged, and just as fascinating.
A historical walk in a timeless place April 2, 2009
J. I. Uitto (Brooklyn, NY, USA)
This classic account of the author's climbing expedition to Mir Samir in Afghanistan in the 1950s is both informative and entertaining. The tone of the volume shifts from light and hilarious to more exhausted as the author moves from preparation of the trip in England and Wales to the actual hardships in the Hindu Kush. Yet Newby never loses his wry humor. The extensive and detailed nature descriptions are well-crafted but may become a bit tedious at times. But the descriptions of the culture and people the author meets along the way are never boring. Having been written before political correctness, the descriptions are quite straightforward, like when they are hiring staff for the expedition, one of whom "had a broad, stupid face, like an old-fashioned prize-fighter, with a thick trunk-like nose and a deeply lined forehead with a wart on it." It is easy to see the man in front of you! Perhaps explaining some of the ethnic and religious differences that still dominate Afghan politics, Newby tells that: "The Tajiks are the original Persian owners of the Afghan soil, conquered and dispossessed by the Pathans but still speaking Persian; agriculturalists, Sunnites, intense in their religion, a far more ancient people than the Hazaras, round-headed, flat-faced Mongols who were settled in Central Afghanistan by Genghis Khan in the fourteenth century in the region he himself had depopulated and converted to the Shiah faith in the eighteenth by Nader Shah's Persian army."
 A Pleasant Waking Companion March 28, 2009
Charles Tillinghast
Self-educated as a writer, Eric Newby has produced a number of books falling in the category, "Travel." They are really essays, light commentaries on the human condition in unfamiliar surroundings. His first, "The Last Great Grain Race," concerned sailing as an eighteen year old, unskilled member of the crew of a four-masted sailing "freighter" on the last grain race of such a ship from Australia to Europe. A delightful tale.
His hike through the Hindu Kush is one of his most entertaining works. Employed in the Ladies Lingerie Department in a London department store, he was invited by a chum to join in a hiking trip in the mountains of Afghanistan. He accepted of course. With delightful humor in his self-deprecating way, Newby describes the adventure, the country through which they passed, the miscues and the sometimes hair-raisingly dangerous spots into which the two got themselves.
It is certainly not intended as a detailed account in the art of mountain climbing. More likely a primer on how it should not be done. Nor is it a detailed account of the geography and topography of the Hindu Kush. It is an entertaining and delightful account of a personal experience of considerable daring and danger, all with a light touch.
A Ramble Through Afghanistan... January 4, 2009
J. C. Anderson (Los Altos, CA United States)
What can I say...a thoroughly enjoyable read (and I've reread this book several times)! Newby and his companion are "innocents abroad" and his recounting of their misadventures kept me chuckling throughout.
If you're looking for deep insights into the Afghan culture and people, this isn't the book for you. But if you enjoy travel-writing told with a dry wit, then check it out.
Oh, and by the way...if you're a fan of Wilfred "Arabian Sands" Thesiger, don't miss Newby's chance encounter with him at the end of the book. Good for a laugh!
Great stuff!
A lesson in how the world has changed in 50 years August 11, 2008
Pastor of Disaster (Wexford, Ireland)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Ok, I have read the reviews about this book, most of which have "got it" and some of whom have not. Firstly get a map or even better a globe (a kind of round map) and see just how far London (England) is from Afghanistan. Now try and imagine driving there in a family car, not one of those road going ocean liners known I believe as "SUV's", through countries, some of which are considered too dangerous for westerners to enter.
Remember that even at the time of writing, Britain was still recovering from the effects of WW2, indeed rationing continued until 1954, and those who had the money to travel might have considered a trip by train to Blackpool (a seaside resort in the north-west of England) quite an adventure. So the idea of on a whim jumping into the family jalopy and driving 2/3 of the way around the world might be considered a tad eccentric. The 2 adventurers are total amateurs, if I remember rightly; they are stuck on a glacier half way up the mountain, and have to refer to their mountain climbing textbook on how to get off it!
Imagine 2 gentlemen after having a couple of gliding lessons deciding to build a rocket in their back garden and go into space? That's the sort of order of magnitude of adventure that Newby and Carless embarked on. Also one has to bear in mind that in the 50's, Afghanistan was to all intents and purposes cut off from the "modern" world and quite literally the back of beyond.
As a Brit, I am aware of the issues of our colonial past, but I still retain a soft spot for the pith helmeted "gentleman adventurer", the sort of people who in the 20's might have climber Everest but turned back when they couldn't get the grand piano and rowing boat past the 5th base camp at 27,000 ft.
It's hard to describe in these days of Google earth how large the world was in those days. Its been many years since I read this book, and I am writing this review because I have loaned it to a friend who is going to Kathmandu for a wedding and wanted to give to her a book to read on the plane that would make her laugh.
This book is unlikely, and funny, and I feel the world is a little sadder for the loss of the generation of men who could attempt such whimsy.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 32
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