Nick Middletongeographer, travel writer, and Oxford donpits himself against the punishing extremes of the fabled route that links East and West.

The Silk Road cuts through one of the most extraordinary landscapes on the planet. A vast region separating China from the Mediterranean, it is one of the most inhospitable places on eartha forbidding terrain of hostile deserts, treacherous mountain ranges, howling winds, searing heat, and blistering cold. No stranger to unforgiving territory, Nick Middleton follows in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and Marco Polo, overland from China to Istanbul, surviving, as they did, the life-sapping Gobi Desert, the icy mountain passes of Tibet, and the daunting Steppes of Turkmenistan. Part Oxford professor, part Indiana Jones, Middleton spins together his outrageous feats of endurance with insightful commentary on our planet and its peoples.