Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game & the Race for Empire in Central Asia

The original Great Game (1800-1917), the clandestine struggle between Russia and Britain for mastery of Central Asia, has long been regarded as one of the greatest geopolitical conflicts of the nineteenth century. The prize, control of the vast Eurasian heartland, was believed by some to be key to world dominion. Teeming with improbable drama and exaggerated tensions, the conflict featured soldiers, mystics, archeologists, and spies, among them some of history's most colorful characters. -- Russia's greatest explorer, Nicholas Przhevalsky, who died trying to shoot his way to Lhasa -- Nicholas Roerich, the Russian artist and mystic who searched for fabled Shambhala under the patronage of Henry Wallace, the American Secretary of Agriculture -- Philadelphia socialite Brooke Dolan, a figure out of Hemingway who reached Lhasa as an OSS operative -- SS Captain Ernst Schafer, who led an expedition to Tibet in the late 1930s in an attempt to confirm Nazi racial theories -- William Rockhill, the first American to befriend and advise a Dalai LamaDrawing on a wealth of new material, Meyer and Brysac have written a sweeping history of a riveting tournament, a two-century joust with political and economic implications that remain as a topical today as this morning's newspaper.