Book review: Mud and Stars, by Sara Wheeler (Amazon / Book Depository) Russia was the first foreign country I ever visited. I was eleven. I have been looking over my shoulder at it ever since. I think there are many who share that sentiment, and it makes this genre of memoirs of Russia or travelogues... Continue Reading →
Oral Histories from “The Last of the Soviets” #WITMonth
Book review: Secondhand Time, by Svetlana Alexievich (Amazon / Book Depository) In writing, I’m piecing together the history of “domestic,” “interior” socialism. As it existed in a person’s soul. I’ve always been drawn to this miniature expanse: one person, the individual. It’s where everything really happens. 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time is... Continue Reading →
The Wild, Wonderful World of Couchsurfing in Russia
Book review: Behind Putin's Curtain, by Stephan Orth (Amazon / Book Depository) Hamburg-based journalist Stephan Orth has written several books about his global couchsurfing adventures in unconventional locales. Orth brings a certain cheerful openness and humorous curiosity to his adventuring, and of the touristic method of couchsurfing, he mentions that it offers "the mutual gift... Continue Reading →
An American’s Insights into Russia, 1995-2005-2015
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 →
What Makes the Russians Tick
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 →