Books: Adventure in the East

A PERSON FROM ENGLAND, AND OTHER TRAVELERS TO TURKESTAN (314 pp.)—Fitzroy Maclean—Harper ($5).

This book is a reverent and amusing hymn to a handful of adventurers who penetrated the bone-littered wastes of Central Asia during the past 125 years. Many of them stayed there, with their heads cleaved from their bodies by the bloodthirsty rulers of Bokhara, Merv, Kokand and Khiva. The most fascinating of these adventurers was one Joseph Wolff, a disputatious Jew turned Anglican missionary, who set out in 1843 to rescue two British officers held captive in Bokhara.

Poker at Seven....