NONFICTION - April 28, 1991

ON THE OTHER SIDE: A Journey Through Soviet Central Asia by Geoffrey Moorhouse (Henry Holt: $19.95; 189 pp.). While a picture may be worth a thousand words, not all of us can see a thousand words in a picture. This is why the cynics who predict the obsolescence of literary travel books in an age of National Geographic TV specials and state-of-the-art picture books are so off the mark: Sometimes we need a gifted and practiced observer like British writer Geoffrey Moorhouse to bring to life a world we might miss with our own eyes. Where we might pass over a faded portrait of virgin and child in a Central Asian church, for example, Moorhouse speculates that a monk painted the virgin “not as a work of art but as an act of worship: blessing the woods and pigment before he began, preparing himself before taking up his brush, by fasting, by confession, by communion.”

The two regions that Moorhouse profiles were rocked by conflict well after the presses for this book began rolling--Kazakhstan by a coal miners’ strike, Uzbekistan by ethnic violence. But bad timing is not wholly to blame: One suspects Moorhouse would have discovered at least hints of discontent had he departed from the apolitical style of the National Geographic Society (which sponsored his trip) long enough to ask more probing questions of the locals.