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Author: Richard Sayette
Publisher: Peace Corps Writers
ISBN: 9781935925927
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
In a radio broadcast on October 1st, 1939, Winston Churchill referred to Russia as, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." During my tenure as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Russian Far East, I found Churchill's words to be accurate, as my limited knowledge about Russia stemmed from Dostoevsky and Pushkin novels. From the summer of 1994 until late 1995, I lived and worked in the Russian Far East as a Peace Corps Volunteer managing a small business center; only a few miles from both the Chinese and North Korean borders. I experienced firsthand the thrilling and often confusing environment as the Russian people established a foothold in a more open society marked by their initial forays into capitalism. My experiences living with a Russian family, managing a business center catering to Russian entrepreneurs and running with and from the Mafia during this tumultuous period allowed me insight into the Russian soul and allowed me to examine my own. Fluctuating between enjoying local celebrity status to being a suspected American spy, I had the opportunity to socialize with Russian and American politicians, various mafia organizations and Russians from all walks of life. The book takes a humorous and insightful look at the cultural differences between America and Russia as well as providing a peek at how my Russian friends and colleagues dealt with the flux of change within every aspect of their lives. Although this book is based on real events, I have changed the names of some of my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers and the Peace Corps staff for reasons of discretion.
Author: Richard Sayette
Publisher: Peace Corps Writers
ISBN: 9781935925927
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Get Book Here
Book Description
In a radio broadcast on October 1st, 1939, Winston Churchill referred to Russia as, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." During my tenure as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Russian Far East, I found Churchill's words to be accurate, as my limited knowledge about Russia stemmed from Dostoevsky and Pushkin novels. From the summer of 1994 until late 1995, I lived and worked in the Russian Far East as a Peace Corps Volunteer managing a small business center; only a few miles from both the Chinese and North Korean borders. I experienced firsthand the thrilling and often confusing environment as the Russian people established a foothold in a more open society marked by their initial forays into capitalism. My experiences living with a Russian family, managing a business center catering to Russian entrepreneurs and running with and from the Mafia during this tumultuous period allowed me insight into the Russian soul and allowed me to examine my own. Fluctuating between enjoying local celebrity status to being a suspected American spy, I had the opportunity to socialize with Russian and American politicians, various mafia organizations and Russians from all walks of life. The book takes a humorous and insightful look at the cultural differences between America and Russia as well as providing a peek at how my Russian friends and colleagues dealt with the flux of change within every aspect of their lives. Although this book is based on real events, I have changed the names of some of my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers and the Peace Corps staff for reasons of discretion.
Author: John Steinbeck
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014118633X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Just as the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Steinbeck and Capa began a remarkable journey through the Soviet Union. Combining Steinbeck's compassion and humour with Capa's photographs, this text is a unique portrit of Russia and its people as they emerged from the ravages of war.
Author: Theodore Dreiser
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812292383
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Theodore Dreiser's Russian Diary is an extended record of the American writer's travels throughout the Soviet Union in 1927-28. Dreiser was initially invited to Moscow for a week-long observance of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. He asked, and was granted, permission to make an extended tour of the country. This previously unpublished diary is a firsthand record of life in the USSR during the 1920s as seen by a leading American cultural figure. It is a valuable primary source, surely among the last from this period of modern history.
Author: Nicholas Roerich
Publisher: Adventures Unlimited Press
ISBN: 9780932813930
Category : Altai Mountains
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Nicholas Roerich's classic 1929 mystic travel book is back in print! He kept a diary of his travels by yak and camel through a remote region still largely unknown today. An intellectual as well as an adventurer, he chronicles his expedition through Sinkiang, Altai-Mongolia and Tibet from 1924 to 1928 in twelve exciting chapters detailing his encounters along the parched byways of Central Asia. With a special interest in geographical mysteries and arcane and mystical arts, he searches for the hidden cities of Shambala and Agartha. Roerich's original drawings, as well as reproductions of his inspiring paintings illustrate this unique travel book.
Author: Diana Gleadhill
Publisher: Odyssey Books & Maps
ISBN:
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
Kamchatka has some of the most stunning and dramatic volcanic scenery in the world and an inordinate amount of wildlife. This account of two Irish ladies "d'un Certain Age" in Russia's Far East draws us into this magnificent landscape.
Author: Craig W. H. Luther
Publisher: Schiffer Military History
ISBN: 9780764343766
Category : Soviet Union
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This book examines in unprecedented detail the advance of Germany's Army Group Center through central Russia, toward Moscow, in the summer of 1941, followed by brief accounts of the Battle of Moscow and subsequent winter battles into early 1942. Based on hundreds of veterans' accounts, archival documents, and exhaustive study of the pertinent primary and secondary literature, the book offers new insights into Operation Barbarossa, Adolf Hitler's attack on Soviet Russia in June 1941. While the book meticulously explores the experiences of the German soldier in Russia, in the cauldron battles along the Minsk-Smolensk-Moscow axis, it places their experiences squarely within the strategic and operational context of the Barbarossa campaign. Controversial subjects, such as the culpability of the German eastern armies in war crimes against the Russian people, are also examined in detail. This book is the most detailed account to date of virtually all aspects of the German soldiers' experiences in Russia in 1941.
Author: Ian Frazier
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429964316
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 541
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Book Description
A Dazzling Russian travelogue from the bestselling author of Great Plains In his astonishing new work, Ian Frazier, one of our greatest and most entertaining storytellers, trains his perceptive, generous eye on Siberia, the storied expanse of Asiatic Russia whose grim renown is but one explanation among hundreds for the region's fascinating, enduring appeal. In Travels in Siberia, Frazier reveals Siberia's role in history—its science, economics, and politics—with great passion and enthusiasm, ensuring that we'll never think about it in the same way again. With great empathy and epic sweep, Frazier tells the stories of Siberia's most famous exiles, from the well-known—Dostoyevsky, Lenin (twice), Stalin (numerous times)—to the lesser known (like Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the empress for copying her dresses) to those who experienced unimaginable suffering in Siberian camps under the Soviet regime, forever immortalized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. Travels in Siberia is also a unique chronicle of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, a personal account of adventures among Russian friends and acquaintances, and, above all, a unique, captivating, totally Frazierian take on what he calls the "amazingness" of Russia—a country that, for all its tragic history, somehow still manages to be funny. Travels in Siberia will undoubtedly take its place as one of the twenty-first century's indispensable contributions to the travel-writing genre.
Author: Andrea Lee
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 030749036X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
“A subtly crafted reflection of both the bleak and golden shadings of Russian life . . . Its tones belong more to the realm of poetry than journalism.” –The New York Times Book Review At age twenty-five, Andrea Lee joined her husband, a Harvard doctoral candidate in Russian history, for his eight months’ study at Moscow State University and an additional two months in Leningrad. Published to enormous critical acclaim in 1981, Russian Journal is the award-winning author’s penetrating, vivid account of her everyday life as an expatriate in Soviet culture, chronicling her fascinating exchanges with journalists, diplomats, and her Soviet contemporaries. The winner of the Jean Stein Award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters–and the book that launched Lee’s career as a writer–Russian Journal is a beautiful and clear-eyed travel-writing classic. “[Lee] takes us wherever she is, conveying a feeling of place and atmosphere that is the mark of real talent.” –The Washington Post Book World “A book of very great charm . . . [Lee] records what she saw and heard with unassuming delicacy and exactness.” –Newsweek
Author: Bruce Robbins
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822372177
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
From iPhones and clothing to jewelry and food, the products those of us in the developed world consume and enjoy exist only through the labor and suffering of countless others. In his new book Bruce Robbins examines the implications of this dynamic for humanitarianism and social justice. He locates the figure of the "beneficiary" in the history of humanitarian thought, which asks the prosperous to help the poor without requiring them to recognize their causal role in the creation of the abhorrent conditions they seek to remedy. Tracing how the beneficiary has manifested itself in the work of George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid, Naomi Klein, and others, Robbins uncovers a hidden tradition of economic cosmopolitanism. There are no easy answers to the question of how to confront systematic inequality on a global scale. But the first step, Robbins suggests, is to acknowledge that we are, in fact, beneficiaries.
Author: Louise McReynolds
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501728776
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
An athlete becomes a movie star; a waiter rises to manage a chain of nightclubs; a movie scenarist takes to writing restaurant reviews. Intrepid women hunt bears, drive in automobile races, and fly, first in balloons and then in airplanes. Sensational crimes jump from city streets onto the screen almost before the pistols have had a chance to cool. Paris in the Twenties? Fitzgerald's New York? Early Hollywood? No, tsarist Russia in the last decades before the Revolution. In Russia at Play, Louise McReynolds recreates a vibrant, rapidly changing culture in rich detail. Her account encompasses the "legitimate" stage, vaudeville, nightclubs, restaurants, sports, tourism, and the silent movie industry. McReynolds reveals a pluralist and dynamic society, and shows how the new icons of mass culture affected the subsequent gendering of identities. The rapid industrialization and urbanization of the late tsarist period spawned dramatic social changes—an urban middle class and a voracious consumer culture demanded new forms of entertainment. The result was the rapid incursion of commercial values into the arts and the athletic field and unprecedented degrees of social interaction in the new nightclubs, vaudeville houses, and cheap movie houses. Traditional rules of social conduct shifted to greater self-fulfillment and self-expression, values associated with the individualism and consumerism of liberal capitalism. Leisure-time activities, McReynolds finds, allowed Russians who partook of them to recreate themselves, to develop a modern identity that allowed for different senses of the self depending on the circumstances. The society that spawned these impulses would disappear in Russia for decades under the combined blows of revolution, civil war, and collectivization, but questions of personal identity are again high on the agenda as Russia makes the transition from a collectivist society to one in which the dominant ethos remains undefined.
