Health Care in Central Asia.

My wife and I worked in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as advisers on primary care for 3 months in 1995 for a North American agency in Almaty. I returned for another couple of weeks in 1996 for the UK Overseas Development Agency. If this book had been available then I would have made fewer mistakes, understood sooner what I was seeing, and might have jumped off that bus before I was pushed. It is an excellent guide for any first visitor. All the chapters are well and clearly written, with less repetition than is usual in books of this kind. The authors generally do their best to write for the World Health Organization rather than the World Bank, though bankspeak seems obligatory now for all experts wanting continued support from their sponsors. All that said, I remain astonished that so many intelligent observers could have spent so much time in such a fascinating and often exhilarating part of the world, so crammed with compressed modern history and so full of future possibilities, but transmit so little of that excitement to their readers. Kazakhstan alone is the size of all Western Europe, moved completely from nomadic to fully literate industrialized society in less than 30 years, and sits on top of the world’s largest oil and gas reserves outside Saudi Arabia. It is a cockpit of new geopolitical rivalries, which largely explains intense international interest in its disintegrating health services. Books of this kind would be even more useful, and a much better read, if some responsible broadsheet journalism were included, and some space given for local professionals, and the people they serve, to speak for themselves. Those I met had plenty to say.