Reviews for Beyond Ararat

The average rating for Beyond Ararat based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-08-29 00:00:00 Michael Garrison This was a book group read and due to the fact that my beloved fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Urrutia, was also a cycling tourist(and author)I was pretty excited to read it and definitely predisposed to like it. However, it was just okay or 3 stars for me. My, admittedly perhaps petty, complaints are these: she presumes you already have a knowledge base of the area. Without Wiki and Google this would have been considerably less enjoyable. The pictures are crap. This is probably not her fault, predating digital photography would have extremely limited what she could carry, and I imagine her publisher limited what made the book even further but they were like bad copies of copies. I eventually found some Dutch guy's website that provided many wonderful pictures of quite of a few of the areas she visited, very helpful. And I could not quite get past the cavalier attitude she had towards safety. This is a dangerous part of the world, then and now. I was amazed she was not assaulted or seriously injured. She was quite sick for a period, often went into restaurant's and taverns where she was the only woman (ok, don't go hatin' on me, it's true, she is a grown woman but where she was traveling this seems unwise), stayed with strangers, had sticks and rocks thrown at her, trucks try to push her off the road, and was chased by vicious dogs. Would traveling with a companion really be so bad? Could she not have phoned home now and then at least when she stopped to exchange currency. Her husband must have nerves of steel and the disposition of a saint or a very large life insurance policy on her. Brave or crazy, all of this kept me from fully enjoying the book. I did enjoy all that I learned. I began thinking, oh this is pretty good, I'm learning so much! Then I realized that most of it I was learning from other sources. I did appreciate, greatly appreciate, her mostly open minded and unbiased acceptance of the people and political situations she traveled through. She did not preach her well illustrated but unstated view that pretty much everywhere in the world most people are good, kind and deserving of our trust. Would that we could all understand and practice it as groups and nations rather than just as individuals.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-11-17 00:00:00 Ryan Kron Selby travels through a part of Turkey generally off-limits to foreign visitors - for good reason: the PKK (Kurdish party) regularly kidnaps foreigners. She meets with a fair amount of hostility from locals, though many Kurds befriend her as well; I found her take on that situation objectively balanced. Also featured is her interest in Armenian historical sites, as well as visits to the only active Christian communities in the nation (Syrian Orthodox) outside Istanbul.