Where is your nonfiction section please.
Book review: The Bread and the Knife, by Dawn Drzal (Amazon / Book Depository) Former cookbook editor Dawn Drzal's memoir is structured around 26 dishes or ingredients of significance in her life, matched up to the letters of the alphabet. Although the alphabet theme is a bit gimmicky, the writing is anything but. Drzal draws... Continue Reading →
Book review: Bears in the Streets, by Lisa Dickey Amazon No fewer than six people in six different cities (and four different time zones) had informed me that this is what Americans think. "Bears in the streets," I realized, was the apparently ubiquitous shorthand for the Russians' feeling that the West doesn't take them seriously enough... Continue Reading →
Book review: Russians, by Gregory Feifer "Russia has no need of sermons (she has heard too many), nor of prayers (she has mumbled them too often), but of the awakening in the people a feeling of human dignity, lost for so many ages in mud and filth." - Vissarion Belinsky on the Russian Orthodox Church in a letter to... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya Book Depository Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is one of contemporary Russia's most loved and accoladed author/playwrights, famous for her books of "scary fairytales"(There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby) and "love stories" (There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband and He... Continue Reading →
Book review: Great Soul of Siberia, by Sooyong Park (Amazon / Book Depository) Back in 2010, I read a book so good that even while I was reading it I knew it was going to be hard to top. It was around the time I was shifting to reading primarily nonfiction, and John Vaillant's The Tiger was influential in... Continue Reading →
Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 - A World on the Edge by Helen Rappaport (Amazon / Book Depository) Helen Rappaport, author of 2014's popular history The Romanov Sisters, among other titles on history and royals both Russian and otherwise, explains in her acknowledgments for Caught in the Revolution that while working as a historian she... Continue Reading →
Book review: 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution selected by Boris Dralyuk (Amazon / Book Depository) In college I took a class in Russian Literature of the Silver Age. This is the period of the late 19th/early 20th century when Russian literature reached impressive creative heights. It was such an enlightening course, and introduced... Continue Reading →
Bridge across the River Don in Rostov-on-Don, Russia; one of many cities that were the scenes of the grisly crimes of Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, also known as the Rostov Ripper or the Red Ripper. Photo credit: Zhanett.b, Wikimedia Commons. Book review: The Red Ripper: Inside the Mind of Russia's Most Brutal Serial Killer, by Peter... Continue Reading →
Book review: Almost Home by Filipp Velgach (Amazon / Book Depository) Almost Home is the memoir of Filipp Velgach, an American of Ukrainian heritage. He was recruited to translate in the Ukraine for a group of documentary filmmakers in 2013, at the time of major unrest and protests revolving around then-president Yanukovych and Ukraine's relationship... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Falcon and the Snowman by Robert Lindsey (Amazon (1.99 ebook alert there!) / Book Depository) Two childhood friends, former altar boys, develop their own espionage "scam", as they call it, and become unlikely spies, selling government documents to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It would make an entertaining basis for a spy... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 