Lands of Lost Borders

April 1, 2018

In childhood, Harris dreamed of being an explorer, and pedaling down the Silk Road with a friend showed her what modern exploration is: not charting boundaries but passing beyond one's own. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 9, 2018
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.

Starred review from September 15, 2018
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from June 1, 2018
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 venue...for 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.

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