Review by Choice Review
In updating the first edition (2001) of her book, Whitfield makes Life along the Silk Road align more with the recent academic focus on the Silk Road. By adding a new chapter and a new prologue, Whitfield brings Africa and Europe to the original geographic focus, introduces the involvement of African merchants and the maritime Silk Road, and adds more cultural elements to the picture. These new efforts result in a more completely reconstructed Silk Road and more colorfully depicted life stories of the trader, the solider, the monk, the courtesan, and so forth along the Silk Road. Though overall an interesting work to read, its hybrid narrative-history genre can sometimes be a bit misleading, largely because of the methodology of highly synthesizing the sources. For example, the unusually long traveling path of the merchant may give readers the impression that long-distance trading constituted a major way of doing business of the day. Nevertheless, this book serves as good complementary reading to more scholarly works on this subject, such as Valerie Hansen's The Silk Road: A New History (CH, Mar'13, 50-4005). Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Hanmo Zhang, State University of New York, New Paltz
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
