Lands of lost borders : a journey on the Silk Road /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"Lands of Lost Borders carried me up into a state of openness and excitement I haven't felt for years. It's a modern classic."--Pico Iyer

A brilliant, fierce writer, and winner of the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize, makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir of her journey by bicycle along the Silk Road--an illuminating and thought-provoking fusion of The Places in Between, Lab Girl, and Wild that dares us to challenge the limits we place on ourselves and the natural world.

As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she craved--to be an explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician--had gone extinct. From what she could tell of the world from small-town Ontario, the likes of Marco Polo and Magellan had mapped the whole earth; there was nothing left to be discovered. Looking beyond this planet, she decided to become a scientist and go to Mars.

In between studying at Oxford and MIT, Harris set off by bicycle down the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel. Pedaling mile upon mile in some of the remotest places on earth, she realized that an explorer, in any day and age, is the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. Forget charting maps, naming peaks: what she yearned for was the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. The farther she traveled, the closer she came to a world as wild as she felt within.

Lands of Lost Borders, winner of the 2018 Banff Adventure Travel Award and a 2018 Nautilus Award, is the chronicle of Harris's odyssey and an exploration of the importance of breaking the boundaries we set ourselves; an examination of the stories borders tell, and the restrictions they place on nature and humanity; and a meditation on the existential need to explore--the essential longing to discover what in the universe we are doing here.

Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer, Kate Harris offers a travel account at once exuberant and reflective, wry and rapturous. Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of the self that can never fully be mapped. Weaving adventure and philosophy with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders celebrates our connection as humans to the natural world, and ultimately to each other--a belonging that transcends any fences or stories that may divide us.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Canadian nature writer Harris had always dreamed of being an explorer like Marco Polo, or going to Mars, or both. Prior to attending graduate school at Oxford, she convinced her childhood friend Mel to bike part of the Silk Road with Harris for four months near the Tibetan Plateau. Through Oxford, then MIT, love found and lost, Harris hungered for the road, longing to bike the remainder. She quits her MIT PhD program, convinces Mel, again, to join her, and they continue their trek. During their lengthy (4,350-mile) journey, they face everything from icy puddles, lost bicycle parts, difficulties with visas, guard rails, countless instant noodle meals, and frequent stays with total strangers. Unfortunately, what could have been a deep exploration of cultures and people dissolves into an impersonal, distant view of a long expedition. Oddly disjointed history lessons are mixed in, at times with little transition or context for the jump in or out of the past. For a travel writer, Harris seemingly has little interest in the people or places she experienced along the way. Verdict For fans of Harris's travel articles or cycling journey sagas.-Katie Lawrence, Grand Rapids, MI © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Nature writer and adventurer Harris details her bike journey along the Silk Road, in this beautifully rendered if sometimes slow-moving debut. Growing up, Harris wanted to be an explorer; when she got older, however, she went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and later to MIT where she found the drudgery of the laboratory unbearable. As an escape, she and her best friend, Mel, planned their bike adventure and were soon pedaling along the Silk Road, starting on the pungent banks of the Black Sea ("The bottom waters are poor in oxygen but rich in hydrogen sulphide, a colourless, poisonous gas that reeks of rotten eggs"). They biked across often treacherous landscapes (and took planes or trains along routes inaccessible by bike) through Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, India, Nepal, and China; they ascended mountains and traversed river valleys. The trip concluded at the Siachen Glacier in the Himalayas at the edge of the Tibetan plateau, where "the wind was more alive than the branches it moved, and so big it could only be the mountains breathing." Harris's talent is in her prose, as she offers breathtaking descriptions of the Silk Road, shrouded in mystery and wonder. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Natural history devotee Harris' debut is an homage to science a love letter to geology, zoology, astronomy, and everything in between and a travelogue-memoir in which she traces her academic pursuits, solo travels, and year-long bicycle trek along the storied Silk Road with her dear friend, Mel. Starting in Turkey, the intrepid duo navigates thousands of kilometers along with all kinds of weather, police assistance and interference, government bureaucracy, visa woes, searing muscles, and soaring spirits. In journeying to their Himalayan destination, Kate and Mel cut through boundaries both real and imagined, exploring the complexities of control and the ambiguity of borders (most poignantly vivified in Chinese-controlled Tibet) while questioning if exploration is flawed by its inherent desire to lay claim to place and experience. Fueled by the observations of someone fascinated by her surroundings, Harris' stunning and nuanced prose limns sweeping landscapes and offers engaging history lessons all while maintaining a brilliant self-awareness and authenticity. Vivid, pithy descriptions read like indelible poetry, exemplifying Harris' reverence for the interconnectedness of our world. Lands of Lost Borders is illuminating, heart-warming, and hopeful in its suggestion that we will explore not to conquer but to connect. After all, "what does the Silk Road have to do with Mars, except everything?" A sure hit with book groups.--Katharine Uhrich Copyright 2018 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A debut travelogue chronicling a modern explorer's bicycle ride along the ancient Silk Road, a journey that beautifully reveals much about the history and nature of exploration itself."Born centuries too late for the life I was meant to live," Harris cultivated an early love affair with wilderness, exploration, and the unknown. Due to a chance encounter with a children's book, the author became particularly intrigued by Marco Polo, and she "decided to be just like him when I grew up." Though she studied at such prestigious institutions as Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and MIT, school was merely "a venuefor exploration." While the narrative is peppered with brief, entertaining vignettes about some of the author's early travels, the meat of her story is the nearly yearlong bike ride following the Silk Road with her pal Mel. With humor, deep sentiment, and often poetic prose, Harris takes the reader not only through "the stans" (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, etc.) of Asia, but also through the history and current state of adventure travel. Along the way, the author provides insightful discussions of national borderlines, for which she clearly has little use. "The more I learned about the South Caucasus, with its closed borders and warring enclaves," she writes, "the more the place seemed like a playground game of capture-the-flag, all in the dubious name of nationalism." This is a tale of beautiful contrasts: broken landscapes and incomparable mountain vistas, repugnant sights and smells and euphoric baklava hangovers, geographic neighbors at war and the moving hospitality of total strangers. Harris explains the grueling and sublime nature of biking through descriptions of impoverished yet beautiful places as well as the fraught history and hopeful future of her kind. "Explorers might be extinct, in the historic sense of the vocation," she writes, "but exploring still exists, will always exist: In the basic longing to learn what in the universe we are doing here."Exemplary travel writing: inspiring, moving, heartfelt, and often breathtaking. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.