This is a book of ambitious scope that presents an overview of the histories, current politics, economics, ways of life, and cultures of the five states of formerly Soviet Central Asia as well as Turkey and Iran. It appears to be intended as a lively introduction for nonspecialists. The author's treatment of recent politics, especially the consolidation of power in the hands of presidential strongmen and the problem of corruption, provides concise summaries of developments since the close of the Soviet era. Yet the book's weaknesses outweigh its strengths.

One problem lies in the book's structure. Except for the introduction and conclusion, each of its chapters is dedicated to one country. Issues that transcend state borders, such as the transition from the Soviet centralized-command economy or policies to transform the status of women, therefore receive only fragmentary coverage. One of the book's longest chapters deals with Turkey, yet the discussion of that country has little to do with Central Asia. As the author acknowledges, Turkey's attempt to influence the newly independent states in Central Asia did not amount to much. A country that has much more to do with Central Asian affairs, Afghanistan, is not the subject of a chapter in its own right and receives only occasional mention in several chapters.

Another structural problem is that the author jumps from topic to topic. Thus, a discussion of the tensions between Islamist political groups and the Turkish military leads to a tangent about the role of yogurt in Turkish cuisine. A discussion of the persistence of traditional attitudes toward women in contemporary Uzbekistan turns into a discussion of Uzbek food. A section that, according to its heading, deals with the Tajik minority in Uzbekistan devotes most of its attention to the architecture of Bukhara and Samarkand and wine making in the region.

A considerable body of scholarly literature on Central Asia has been published in the past generation, yet the author cites hardly any of these works. One of the few he does cite is Adrienne Lynn Edgar's Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), yet he appears not to have read this excellent book carefully. Thus, he says regarding the creation of a Turkmen republic in the 1920s, “Soviet policy of nation-building coincided with the recently settled tribal society's aspiration to differentiate itself from the Azeri Turks to the west and the Iranian tribes to the south” (p. 46). As on many occasions in this book, the author cites no source of information to support his assertion. He certainly would not have found corroboration in Edgar's book. In fact, her detailed examination of the subject shows that the causes Hiro identifies were not even relevant. She also makes clear that in the early and mid-1920s, most Turkmens were not “settled.” One may also wonder whom Hiro has in mind when he refers to “Iranian tribes” across the border, given that the Persian speakers of Khorasan were not tribal. He does not mention that there were Turkmens living on the Iranian side of the border; in any event, the Soviet Turkmen elite did not focus on differentiating itself from Turkmens on the southern side of the border.

There are numerous factual errors in the book regarding the past and the contemporary era. For example, according to the author, the Seljuks provoked the wrath of Chingis Khan by killing his emissary in 1218, although in fact the Seljuks had lost control of Central Asia by then. It is not accurate to say that the great 15th-century poet Mir Ali Shir Navaʾi “produced the first Turkic script” (p. 20). Hiro asserts that the first secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, Dinmuhammad Kunaev, received “an unparalleled honor for a Central Asian with a Muslim name” when he was made a member of the Politburo in Moscow in 1971 (p. 235), but the first secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, Nuriddin Muhiddinov, preceded him on that body (then called the Presidium) in 1957, and his successor, Sharaf Rashidov, became a candidate (nonvoting) member in 1961. The author describes a prominent filmmaker from Tajikistan, Davlat Khudonazarov, first as head of the popular front group Rastokhez, then as head of the Democratic Party of Tajikistan, although he was neither. The author's practice of describing the appearance of people who lived many centuries ago for whom there are no surviving portraits or descriptions makes one question his standards of evidence. One cringe-inducing instance is his depiction of Chingis Khan as “slit-eyed” (p. 17).

The author takes issue with the way Soviet policies deracinated Central Asians by Russianizing names. He routinely gives what he presents as the proper versions of names, by which he means how they would be transliterated from standard written Arabic. Yet this approach does not take into account that many Central Asians used vernacular versions of their names among themselves in addition to the Russian spellings. Some of the versions of names the author considers inauthentic reflect not Russian influence but rather the way words are pronounced in Central Asian languages. In addition, some translations of names the author provides are themselves problematic. For example, the Alborz mountain chain in northern Iran should not be transliterated “El Borz”; just because it begins with a sound resembling the Arabic definite article does not mean the word is of Arabic origin. The author treats Enver Pasha's title as if it were his last name.

Many explanations of events are oversimplified or misleading. One reason for this is the author's tendency to accept official explanations at face value. Thus, he presents the Kremlin's justification for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as if that were the whole story. He repeatedly uses the term “Wahhabi” to refer to Islamists in Central Asia in recent years, even though that term was employed loosely in Soviet propaganda and by Central Asian regimes to stigmatize those who challenged the status quo. Sometimes the weakness of explanations appears to have more to do with the author's hazy knowledge of certain subjects. The author depicts ethnic and religious minorities in Iran as being well treated by the Islamic Republic and supportive of it. There is no mention of the uprisings against the regime by Kurds, Turkmens, or Baluches, or the persecution of Bahais (or even their existence). He depicts the banning of the Tudeh Party in 1983 as Tehran's reaction to the Soviet Union's supplying arms to Iraq in the Iran–Iraq War without putting it into the context of the Tehran regime's prior suppression of other, stronger revolutionary groups. The crackdown on these latter groups receives a mere passing mention, with no indication of the violence involved. The author repeatedly ascribes pan-Turkic views to various political groups of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, even though many of them were committed to Kazakh, Uzbek, or Kyrgyz nationalism, not pan-Turkism. The introduction of new currencies in the recently independent states is attributed to such causes as nationalism or the transition to a market economy. There is no mention of the fact that the decision was forced on the Central Asian states by Russia, which replaced the old ruble with a new one in 1993 and set onerous conditions for any successor state wanting to remain in the ruble zone.

Readers seeking an introduction to Central Asia would be well advised to look elsewhere. This book suffers from so many inaccuracies and questionable interpretations that it is more likely to mislead than to inform.