Broken Frontier

On Friday, November 3, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," starring Sacha Baron Cohen, will open in hundreds of theaters nationwide. Audiences will be shocked and amazed at Borat's depiction of a land where fermented horse urine is a beloved beverage, women recently earned the right to ride inside the bus, and shooting dogs from the windows of one's flat is a national sport.

These are all lies.

As Ted Rall reveals in his hilarious "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?", the truth about Kazakhstan is that it is a place where women of marriageable age beat their suitors nearly to death in a game called "Kiss the Girl," and the national sport is betting which of President-for-Life Nursultan Nazarbayev's political opponents will wind up dead in a ditch, tied up and shot multiple times in a "suicide."

"Silk Road to Ruin" follows up Rall's award-winning, bone-chilling account of his narrow escape from war-torn Afghanistan, "To Afghanistan and Back: A Graphic Travelogue" (NBM, 2002) with a 304-page collection of graphic novellas and essays about the "Stans" and the many hair-raising, life-on-the-brink trips he took there for various magazines and media.
• Find out about "buzkashi," headless dead goat polo in which the only rule is that the use of automatic weapons is considered gauche.
• Study the best ways to trick a corrupt military policeman into letting you travel another kilometer to the next checkpoint manned by another corrupt cop.
• Choose your favorite Central Asian despot—is it Nazarbeyev or President-for-Life Saparmurat Niyazov, a.k.a. Turkmenbashi the Great, who has renamed the months of the year and the days of the week after himself and members of his family?

Some comments from the press on “Silk Road to Ruin”:
• "Funny and knowledgeable and serves as a fair (if biased) introduction to a region that we all should be paying more attention to." -Eric Hanson, Minneapolis Star Tribune
• "A sincere (yet still wry) attempt to stave off another disaster. His forte is exposing the comic-tragic truth buried within political rhetoric." -Village Voice
• "Much of "The Silk Road to Ruin" focuses on the absurdities he witnessed traveling through the region. There is a chapter on how to properly bribe guards at checkpoint; horror stories about the food; a collection of the philosophical wisdom of Turkmenbashi, the bizarre and megalomaniacal dictator of Turkmenistan, who re-named the month of September in honor of the title of a book he wrote."-New York Daily News