To the Frontier

by Geoffrey Moorhouse

Book Overview

The award-winning writer recounts his travels from Karachi, through the Sind, Baluchistan, and the Punjab, into the high Hindu Kush, travels that brought him into contact with paradox, danger, and the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0030004543
• ISBN13: 9780030004544
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Holt McDougal
• Length: 285 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Only for real men!

If you travel to the Khyber area today, you will see that the people and landscape how the author describes them have not changed at all. I found his account in so far like a mirror of what I found there in 2007. But although the narrative is in deed anecdotal and to a great extent entertaining it has its lengths as well and I could not find so much adorable in it as the "Guardian" liked it to comment. Maybe the author was also seeking for too much adorable. I found it rather disturbing to include the Sindh into "The Frontier", although it makes some sense, since the clue to the turbulence at the Frontier is more in the Madrasahs of the big cities like Karachi than in the villages of the Khyber Pass area. The people who live there in the Hindukush, mostly Pashtunes (Pathans), although being one of the most ferocious human breed, are indeed great people in so many respects, but - alas! - they often appear not to have education enough to can measure what is right for them when they make political moves. Think of the Germans in Nazi times then you have an idea of what I mean. These people have no right guidance and this makes them so unpredictable. And as the author cites the Superintendent Malik: "Nothing much can be expected of people with empty stomachs!" But even with full stomaches, these people think big of themselves and nothing ever changed this. The British tried already in colonial times, but failed. But the insight of the author was more thorough than mine, when he states something which was not apparent for me, filling a whole chapter in his book: the heroine addiction of the Pakistanis due to the illegal trade along the border line. "In just 2 years the number of users in the country had risen from zero to thirty thousand at least. Most of the addicts were well-to-do people in Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore." Although my contact man, a television man in Islamabad, could not (or did not want to) admit that there is such a real problem in a society given to Islam sovereignty, I think the author is right. The fields of Afghanistan are close by and on both sides live Pashtunes who have no objections or remorse to make a business with their fellow men. Narcotics have always been used in this part of the world! "The British East Indian Company merely perpetuated this ruling monopoly in its own heyday, extending the market to China, and on a smaller scale to Europe until the Germans discovered the process of acetylation in which morphine refined further into heroin. Likewise the heroic tribe of the Pashtunes succumb to the un-heroic consume of drugs. They should know it! Drugs where not on my itinerary, but the political ideas of the Pasthunes, openly expressed in Peshawar, the Frontier town. Moorhouse could not oversee the same issue. Do the Pashtunes want their own responsibilities? How far will it go? "What is all the talk about Pashtunistan one day...we have the thing already, right here, right now!" Right, because for them there ar

To the Frontier

It was a trip Kipling might have envied. After landing in Karachi, inveterate wanderer and preeminent travel writer Geoffrey Moorhouse spent the next three months living out of a haversack and slogging on foot and by jeep, train, and broken-backed busses and trucks as he journeyed to the legendary North-West Frontier. To the Fronteir is his highly readable account of that extraordinary adventure. -- from book's back cover