Extremes along the Silk Road (John Murray; Rs 435), written by an unsettlingly active Oxford don, Nick Middleton, is about adventures taken place in some of the remotest places of the planet—among sand dunes taller than the Eiffel Tower, atop hot rocks in the Gobi desert, with a mask over his face in a remote anthrax-polluted site in the Aral Sea. It’s all in the name of Geography, it’s because such expeditions reveal “the raw material of nature and the relationships people have developed with the physical world”.

Middleton is an earnest character, despite his appetite for danger, and obvious relish in pushing himself. There is a pleasantly geeky aspect to this book, as he repeatedly traipses off to another extreme destination. It’s a fairly engaging account of dramatic “off piste” adventures, though you can’t help having the suspicion that all of this would be better off on television.





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