5 comments about Warbird Recovery: The Hunt for a Rare World War II Plane in Siberia, Russia.

1. I definitely knew nearly nothing about warbirds, or much about airplanes in general, when I picked up this book, but I walked away from it wishing I had a pilots license - a victim of Gordon Page's passion and determination having rubbed off through his recollections. The travel adventures of Page and his companions are sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, but consistently entertaining, and the book is very easy to engage with, which makes it a quick page turner, as well as a quirky introduction into the passions of warbird enthusiasts.
   
   I love travel. I love stories and gritty, difficult, joyful interactions with peculiar locales and cultures, and I cherish being able to sample those adventures through the stories of others. If you're like me, this travel memoir will get you excited. Sketchy helicopter rides, run-ins with the Russian mob, shady bribes organized by shady contacts, etc. - it's all there! And through all the action, you come out with a solid appreciation for the preservation and restoration of history as experienced through these important WWII warbirds.



2. As soon as you start reading the first page you will not be able to put this book down! It is an incredible story that will keep you on the edge of your seat from start to finish. Gordon Page puts you right with him and you will ride the emotional roller coaster he endured throughout this adventure. Read this book and you will wonder why this story has not yet been made into a movie!



3. Gordon Page's Warbird Recovery is a book that once you pick it up, you will not put it down until you finish it. And finish it you will quickly as it is a true to life page turner. Fittingly I finished mine sitting in an airport waiting for my plane. Fortunately I didn't wait as long for my plane to arrive as Gordon and his team did waiting for their's. However, during my wait I got to enjoy Warbird and it made my wait fun and exciting - just like the book. Buy it, read it, enjoy it! I know I did.



4. This book is a narrative of tenacity, grit, adventure and very real danger. This book is for anyone that enjoys a concise and quality read, as it is informative on a variety of topics. Gordon Page crafts an intense tale of his quest for a WWII aircraft as an "Americanski" in various settings throughout Russia in the early 90's. The story is exceptionally well-written and fast-paced. No fluff here, and great descriptions of the horrid accomodations, delectible menu items and treacherous, exploitative and sinister characters Mother Russia offers up for Gordon and his companions to navigate throughout this quest. Gordon was one of the pioneers in military relic treasure-hunting in Russia. Lots of guys have done it since, but Gordon is very lucky to alive as he ran into all of the initial life-threatening obstacles, before the Russians realized the profit opportunities, and became receptive to Westerners looking to buy the remnants of war. Reads like a spy novel, meets travel guide. Excellent. Read this book!!



5. When Gordon sent me the book, I was excited to dig into it, but life is busy, and I didn't get a chance to read it right away. I am sorry I delayed reading it as it is an excellent story. I couldn't put it down once started. Gordon's undying passion and perseverance in the recovery of these WWII relics is impressive. I thought that I have had some pretty crazy adventures moving aircraft around here in the United States, but they are nothing compared to the situations that Gordon and his group had to endure. It makes me very thankful to live in America. Warbird Recovery is a well written story that I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone, even if you are not an aviation fanatic like me. Thanks Gordon!

2 comments about Turkestan Reunion (Kodansha Globe).

1. Turkestan Reunion is a collection of the letters written by Eleanor Lattimore to her family in the United States documenting her honeymoon travels from Beijing, through Siberia, into East Turkestan, and over the Karakorum mountains into British Kashmir.
   
   The route Lattimore takes is epic and ranging, crossing everything from arid deserts, Siberian tundra, and towering mountains. Such a journey would make fascinating reading regardless, yet an even greater part of the intrigue and charm of this book comes from its authorship by a woman in time when even hardy, professional male adventurers sometimes couldn't endure similar conditions. Ms. Lattimore is truly a trailblazer, in the literal sense of trekking across routes tread by the feet of very few, but also in the sense that her adventures in the early part of the 20th century very clearly run contrary to what where then very strong and revered concepts of female domesticity. In 1927, the idea of a traveling, white woman was so foreign and novel that many officials and friends who hosted the Lattimores, European or otherwise, were sometimes at a loss in deciding what kind of arrangements should be made for Eleanor. Not only does Lattimore shatter "womanly domesticity" just by traveling, she also consciously chooses to travel in the most down-to-earth way, reaching for the most authentic experiences. Often she chooses horseback over carriage (when physically possible; the weather in Turkestan often did no permit), she voices preference for the rundown accommodations and authentic food of the locals rather than the plusher European lodging and food that sometimes was available.
   
   Beyond the gender angle, Turkestan Reunion additionally presents a sort of ethnographic experience much less condescending to locals than many travel writings and exploration writings of the time. Lattimore's writing inevitably retains an element of colonial privilege, for example, in the repeated tendency to bestow comical Western names on their guides rather than learning their real names. However, relative to other writers of the time, and to other Westerners in general of the 1920s, the Lattimores display a unique willingness and even desire to commune with locals and acknowledge the hardships of their existence. Eleanor Lattimore with a keen eye documents everyday proceedings of everyday villagers; games among herdsmen, a witch-curing ceremony, marriage and divorce, the arbitration of disputes, these and others are documented in Lattimores casual yet elegant prose. As white travelers in a China still mired in a pseudo-colonized position relative to the rest, there still are many instances where the Lattimores are regaled by obsequious officials and conniving businessmen with banquets and galas, but while these celebrations often compose the bulk of 19th and early 20th century travel writing, Lattimore's book is balanced by the ground-up perspective she is willing to describe. As such, there is a pre-ethnographic element to Lattimore's writing that anticipates the academic enlightenment which led to the understanding that the lives of locals are worth documenting and should be observed from more than just a colonial-overlord perspective.
   
   What drew me to this book was the simple premise of it all; even in our intrepid modern times, young and energetic newly weds are more likely to choose Cabo San Lucas or Paris to celebrate their honeymoon, yet Owen and Eleanor Lattimore chose the foreboding deserts and towering, ice-capped peaks of East Turkestan to celebrate their marriage, and at a time when traveling through such extreme environments was not as easy as buying a bus ticket or boarding an airplane. However, Eleanor Lattimore's simple and descriptive writing style exceeds the novelty of this underlying premise, anticipating a sort of feminist traveling philosophy and capturing an ethnographic ethic to observe, and therefore understand the peoples of the places they visited.



2. Turkestan Reunion is a compendium of letters written by Eleanor Holgate Lattimore to her family while traveling on her over one year honeymoon trip in Siberia, Turkestan and the Karakorum. These letters are arranged according to their date having been written at approximately fifteen day intervals. Each letter is forewarded by a brief resume of the happenings and is heralded by a nice drawing, which I believe is by the Author. It could be called an epistolary travel book and this is not common among travel literature. This very characteristic lends the book its grace and appeal, that emerge strikingly after all these years (it was assembled in 1934 from the journey which took place in 1927-28).
   Why a companion book? Eleanor Lattimore was Owen Lattimore's wife and her husband is famous among students of politics and of the Eastern civilizations for his many contributions to the knowledge of those little known countries in those times. Owen wrote his own books on their original wedding trip, the Desert Road to Turkestan and High Tartary, that are famous in their own right, and probably Eleanor's book is often picked up because its mentioned in these other works.
   However even if it describes events that are already known, Eleanor's outlook on these same occasions is completely different and orginal. A woman's sensibility? Probably, a woman that possesed courage, curiosity, wasn't afraid of disconforts and was able to relate herself with empathy towards her travel companions and the people she met.
   The endurance of the great disconfort of the couple's trip assumes in the Author's prose almost a sense of liberation from the material preoccupations of the civilized world to go back to the essentials of living: protection from cold and heat, food, rest, traveling necessities such as carts and horses, good company.
   The first part of the book contains the description of the seventeen day travel through Siberia, that Eleanor accomplished alone, while the rest narrates the common path through Chinese Turkestan and the five Karakorum Passes. Much attentions is dedicated to the nomads encountered during the journey, the Qazaks the Qirghiz and others.
   The book can truely be defined ethnographic because it is first hand description of a traveling experience accomplished with curiosity and the desire to learn. "One can understand a little of how difficult a province is to rule when one relizes that it still contains flotsam and jetsam remnants of every variety of people who have passed through or conquered the land as well as the scamps and villains who have run away from Chinese law", is an example of the deeply empathic outlook on her experiences.
   Another aspect I particularly love in travel books is the "spirit of place", the ability to make the reader feel inside a different reality. Eleanor Lattimore's Turkestan Reunion truely evokes this feeling, more than Owen Lattimore's High Tartary which is more scholarly and detailed.
   As David Lattimore, the couple's son, affirms in the Biographical Note at the end of the book Eleanor and Owen's journey and love story deserve to be remembered because of their uniqueness and the sense of adventure and youth they are still capable of conveying.

No comments about Readings in Russian Civilization, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1700-1917.

1 comments about Literary St. Petersburg: A Guide to the City and Its Writers.

1. From Pushkin to Brodsky this work walks in the footsteps of the great Russian writers of St. Petersburg. We stop in the places of significance for them in their lives and in their writing, in the lives of their characters also.
   I enjoyed reading about Mandelstam's connection to the synagogue of his childhood. I learned that St. Petersburg had no strictly Jewish quarter but that the district of the synagogue had many Jewish families. I heard the nostalgia in the voice of Brodsky as he described the district he would first return to , if he could visit the city from his American exile, again.
   This is a work rich in literary information which will enrich any lover of Russian Literature.

No comments about Russia and Asia: Nomadic and Oriental Traditions in Russian History (Odyssey Passport).

2 comments about Lost in the Taiga.

1. This story about a journalist who meets with a family that has lived for 50 years all alone in a tiny primitive shack in the Siberian wilderness is fascinating. It appeals to our human fascination with "lost people" or people who have shut themselves away from the world. The descriptions of the family and their lives is an astonishing read. The reader comes off still very puzzled, however, at why they did that. Understandably, even the author did not find the true answer, but after our fascination with the situation is over, we have more questions than are answered. When three of the five family members suddenly die within a month of each other there is little explanation and it takes up only a page of story. I recommend this book, but I should warn that after the story is over, you will have many unanswered questions. The book does not give those of us untutored in Russian history sufficient explanation of the facts of people like this family.



2. TERRIFIC BOOK ABOUT THE CRAZINESS OF THE SOVIET SYSTEM AND THE CRAZINESS OF RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM. A GREAT SURVIVAL STORY OF A FAMILY IN TOTAL ISOLATION DEMONSTRATING THAT SINGLE FAMILY SURVIVAL IS NOT ADEQUATE IN THE LONG RUN.

5 comments about A Ride to Khiva.

1. Burnaby, a classic hero/adventurer type, was the 19th Century's Indiana Jones. His book, a popular sensation when first published in the mid 1800s, chronicles his exciting, dangerous, and sometimes humorous horseback and sleigh/carriage ride from southern Russia to Khiva, in what was then an independant khanate in Central Asia, in the middle of winter. If you like exciting, true adventure travel tales, you owe it to yourself to see this book. A standard by which all subsequent narratives should be measured



2. This is an exciting adventure book, writen in 1876 about the travels of a British Army Captain through Western Siberia into Khiva, a city in Central Asia recently taken by the Russian Empire. It purports to be just travel by an army man at liesure, and wanting to see parts of the world. Since we are in the "Great Game" era, when Britain and Russia were contending for the countries around India, I have the feeling that it was more than that, and that the author's mission was somewhat akin to "checking out the land" in the case of an impending conflict. Anyway, it's extremely well-written, and the descriptions of both the places and the people are first rate! The author obviously had a keen eye, and I would really love to read the report he actually submitted to his superiors in London when he returned. I'm sure it's still buried deeply in their secret files.



3. South central Asia, the focus of the worldýs attention in 2003, received an earlier share of it in the 1870s. For centuries travelersý tales and the mention of such exotic names as Samarcand, Tashkent and Bokhara had aroused interest and fired imaginations. To all this was added rumor in 1875 that British interests in India were threatened by Russian expansionism. In particular, it was believed that Russian forces were massing in the recently occupied city of Khiva, nowadays in Uzbekistan, in preparation for an invasion of India.

   A situation like this fitted perfectly the kind of ýinvestigative reportingý adventures that Frederick Burnaby craved. In 1876, this 33-year-old captain in the British army took leave of absence, and set out for Khiva. The journey involved a ride of over one thousand miles in well below freezing conditions across steppes and wastelands.

   On his return, Burnaby wrote ýA Ride to Khivaý and it instantly became a best seller. A well-educated man, proficient in many languages, and a keen observer of all he encountered, his account still ranks as one of the great adventure classics of literature.

   I am grateful to the neighbor who lent me this book, and can report that reading it has provided many hours of fascination. Burnaby died ten years after writing this book, supposedly during a massacre in the Sudan. Keen Internet browsers might find reference to a recent revelation that throws doubt upon the truth of the official account of his death.




4. A Ride To Khiva: My Travels And Adventures In Central Asia 1875 is the personal memoir of soldier, traveler, writer, and pioneer balloonist Frederick Gustavus Burnaby, who died on January 17, 1885 at the age of 42 who was then a colonel in the British Army and speared to death in the Sudan along with 73 of his men. In 1875 Burnaby chose to personally investigate the rationale behind Russia's exclusion of foreigners in Central Asia. In the middle of winter Burnaby traveled by rail, carriage, sleigh, and horseback, while observing the people and their customs. A classic tale of true adventure, of struggling with language barriers, and of the determination to see one's task through, A Ride To Khiva is very highly recommended reading -- especially for enthusiasts of true adventure sagas.



5. This is a good read. It does not drag at all, and does capture subtle points of the central asian tribal culture that seem to run consistent with behavior to this date.

No comments about Readings in Russian Civilization, Volume 1: Russia Before Peter the Great, 900-1700.

1 comments about The Siberian BAM Guide: Rail, Rivers & Road: North-East Russia's Siberian BAM Railway, Lena River & Kolyma Highway (Trailblazer Guides).

1. This book contains very concise information about the route, cities and history. Such information is difficult to obtain in other books, and so very precious.
   The book is also fun for train lovers to read.

1 comments about The Jews of St. Petersburg: Excursions Through a Noble Past.

1. Excellent source of resource material on famous Jewish personalities and institutions in Russia - the Soviet Union, especially St. Petersburg at the turn of the century. Few such books exist in English. Expecting more such books.