No comments about Russian Travelers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Dumbarton Oaks Studies).

No comments about Italy Illuminated, Volume 1, Books I-IV (The I Tatti Renaissance Library).

No comments about The Three Romes: Moscow, Constantinople, and Rome.

4 comments about The Russians Emerge.

1. Breathtaking images; touching presentations of the people, the culture, the life and times. I came to know Heidi Hollinger during the past decade by seeing her on the cover of many distinguished magazines and reading about her interesting life and work in Russia. She is a world renown photographer for good reason: with this book she has given history a true gift with her unique feel for and portrayal of the moods and challenges of the Russian people. Her fascinating perspectives and excellent artistic, creative, and technical talents are awe inspiring.



2. This woman, Heidi Hollinger, has done an excellent job of portraying Russians with a misunderstanding, foreign eye, typical of the American expatriate. She pretty much took pictures of Russians and gave a little background story, which takes absolutely NO talent and is in no way original nor thought-provoking.



3. Heidi Hollinger has done an excellent job of portraying Russians with a misunderstanding, foreign eye, typical of the American expatriate. She basically took pictures of Russians and gave a background story, and assumed it would be interesting because they are oh, so very different! Unfortunately people eat up unoriginal and un-thought-provoking crap like this all the time.



4. Who is she? Who is Heidi Hollinger but a social climber with a camera, lots of bias and no talent? Someone who forcers herself into being at the right place at the right time, craving fame and attention like the spoiled brat that she is. Quite frankly. In her native Montreal, this pseudo Lolita's done 'em all, too. Pathetic garbage.

1 comments about The European Culture Area.

1. Dr. Jordan writes an excellent introduction to European geography. It is easy to read and understand and chapters are accompanied by lots of self-taken pictures (black and white). It begins with the question of what is Europe and who is European, a very relevant question as the European Union expands. Dr. Jordan lists a dozen empirical characteristics of Europe such as Christian and democratic that isn't universal but serves well as a fundamental description of Europe to a novice.
   
   The best section is on the historical and cultural splits between Northern and Southern Europe, and Western and Eastern Europe. Dr. Jordan details the reasons for the splits; for example, the northerly extent of the Roman Empire and the westerly extent of Islam.
   
   The weakest section is on the European Union which is arguably the most important issue in Europe today and essential for geographers. More detail is needed on what it does and how it works.
   
   I highly recommend it for any geographer, political scientist, or historian interested in Europe but without a lot of background with the region.

No comments about Hedonist's Guide To Moscow 1st Edition (Hedonist's Guide to..., A).

5 comments about Lonely Planet Trans-siberian Railway (Lonely Planet Travel Guides).

1. What you'd expect from Lonely Planet--useful but not comprehensive. I would recommend getting both this and the Trans-Siberian Handbook. It can be a little difficult to find (especially if you don't want to wait 6 weeks).



2. The guidebook is just fine for sightseeing, hotels, restaurants, but for train information, there is almost nothing. Really, almost nothing at all. To take the Trans Siberian, it is very difficult to make stopovers, and get reservations for future trains. And you can't simply board the train in a city or town other than Moscow or Vladavostok, or Beijing. None of this is addressed in the book. So, it's great to have tons of pages of sightseeing information, but for places almost no one will get to, due to the difficulty of reserving future trains.
   
   There is almost virtually no information on how to book the train, or recommendations on how to book it, or where to book it, or the wide range in prices. Hardly anything about the different classes. Hardly anything about the cabins, onboard food, how to buy food at the stations, is there an electrical outlet, train etiquette, etc.
   
   I was very disappoined in the lack of practical information needed. The Trans Siberian is NOT as easy to book as a train from say London to Paris, and the book doesn't address that.



3. As the title says, I found the book a very useful guide. Since I currently live in China, I was mostly just using the portions for Mongolia, and Russia.
   
   My only complaint is the switching around of currency used. Sometime in the Russian portion prices would be listed in US dollars, other times Rubles, and sometimes in Euros. It would have been much better to pick one currency and stick with it. A minor complaint.



4. I was overall disappointed.
   The guide was useful to plan the trip, but much less once on the spot. Quite a bit of information is erronous or outdated (e.g. restaurants/hotels do not exist or are priced over double of what stated, museums have been closed or moved), which especially in Moscow and Yekaterinenburg led to cross-city walks and travels at the end of which we found nothing. This is especially for what concerns the Moscow to Yekaterinenburg part; pages on St. Petersburg, China, Mongolia and the Irkutsk area were much more useful.
   Train and bus info: there is quite a lot of information if you are heading in the St. Petersburg to Beijing direction, but no special indications for if you are taking the opposite direction.
   Last point: guide suggestions are generally targeted to a welthier-than-backpacker budget (though Galina in Moscow was great!).



5. This gives a very comprehensive account of the various routes on the trans siberian, i'v chosen vladivostok to st petersburg! will have my guidebook close at hand during my trip!

5 comments about All the Clean Ones Are Married: And Other Everyday Calamities in Moscow.

1. The book isn't perfect, but it doesn't need to be. It tells about the foibles that the author ran into during her time in Moscow. Rather than attempting to explain everything, she focuses in on some things that occured and tells those stories. Her writing is very easy to read and follow, making the book fairly hard to put down. (I ended reading it over an 8 hour period, taking a lunch and Snood break in the middle.)

   I'm sure I'll re-read this book for the sheer entertainment value...




2. The book isn't perfect, but it doesn't need to be. It tells about the foibles that the author ran into during her time in Moscow. Rather than attempting to explain everything, she focuses in on some things that occured and tells those stories. Her writing is very easy to read and follow, making the book fairly hard to put down. (I ended reading it over an 8 hour period, taking a lunch and Snood break in the middle.)

   I'm sure I'll re-read this book for the sheer entertainment value...




3. I found this book at the local library and decided that it was worth the read, and it was. Lori brings to life true everyday occurances in modern-day Moscow. They are as she sees them, but a little too observatory for my tastes as I prefer to see through the eyes of my writers. Still, it was a good book and I think that any non-Russian living in Moscow can identify with its humorous, yet at the same time depressing, events of the life. (And yes, all of the clean ones ARE married).



4. Living in Russia is scary. By the end of every book I read about Russia, I am relieved that I don't live there. No matter how upbeat and positive the authors are, and they are all pretty optimistic, they come back home having had a huge dose of Russian reality.
   
   Lori Cidylo is fantastically optimistic. Even though her Ukrainian parents try to tell her that Russia is no place for her, she takes her college degrees in Russian and journalism and goes to Moscow to freelance. To freelance! She gets a job at a U.S. newpaper bureau there and begins to settle in.
   
   Nothing is easy. Finding an apartment when there are no rental listings or yellow pages is a challenge. Buying a clothes washer is a major project. Finding someone to reupholster her garish sofa is a wild goose chase. She even has to iron her dollar bills (American currency is accepted for many transactions) because no one will accept them unless they are clean and unwrinkled. And don't get her started on the problems with dating Russian men.
   
   But all that seems trivial compared to being in Moscow during the showdown between Yeltsin and his rebellious Parliament. Cidylo dodged tanks, snipers, and thugs to get her story. Everyday life in Moscow had trained her well for being a reporter in a war zone. Having survived traffic that jumped sidewalks without regard for pedestrians and hooligans who fired automatic weapons at random, Muscovites (and Cidylo) went about their business despite the revolution, because it might go on for months, after all.
   
   Cidylo's writing style is smooth and easy to read. Her training as a reporter is apparent. The prose is spare and free of unnecessary description. Five stars!



5. As a travel/non-fiction junkie, I chose this book after reading several other Russian based travel accounts, and found this to be one of the most interesting yet. Cidylo goes to great pains to make the reader feel that they are in the moment with her. I found her accounts of what it was like as a foreigner AND a woman to be particularly interesting. The only thing keeping me from giving it 5 stars was the fact that the story did drag at points. Highly recommended otherwise.

No comments about Russia Insight Guide (Insight Guides).

2 comments about The Other Russia: The Experience of Exile.

1. This book is about "the Russian dustmen of Cannes", the Russians who fled during and after the Russian revolutions in 1918-1919 and tried to carve out a new life for themselves and their families in the West. The book is made up of 61 chapters, each by a different emigre. Mostly they are extracts from interviews by the book's authors with the emigres; a few are from written sources. A few of the emigres are whiners (the Bolsheviks "took all our lovely horses", one Countess complains) but most have interesting things to say. For royalty watchers, there is the account of Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna's lady-in-waiting of their captivity in the Crimea, and tales of Grand Duchess Ksenia in exile. There are tales of pogroms under imperial Russia, life during the revolution, escape from Russia in multitudes of ways, life in exile, life under the Soviet regime... The book's format makes it easy to skip around, and boring or annoying accounts are easily skipped over. The accounts seem to be weighted in favor of members of the nobility and bourgeoisie. A good book for anyone who is interested in how they lived during the revolution and after.



2. (4.5 stars)
   
   I cringed a bit when I saw that Michael Glenny (an infamously bad translator) was one of the editors of this volume, but in spite of that, I was really drawn into the book. It begins with a very long chapter on an oceanographer who escaped by jumping off of a cruise ship late at night and swimming for three days until he reached the nearest island, and goes on to give us the stories of Russian émigrés from three different eras--on the heels of the Revolution and Civil War, between the World Wars and during WWII, and in the post-WWII era. Quite a few of the people interviewed in Part One, and a fair amount in Part Two, came from the upper-classes (some were even royalty), and so had a radically different experience of those early Soviet days than did the people on the bottom of the social order. The people in Part Three all seem to be from normal classes, though, not a bunch of dispossessed countesses, governors, wealthy people, and what have you. And depending upon which socioeconomic class and geographical area one came from, the experience was going to be different; for example, someone from the ruling classes and in a place like St. Petersburg obviously was going to be against the Revolution from the start, whereas someone who lived in a poorer area in the Ukraine may have initially supported and welcomed these changes, only to find the new rulers were just as bad for them as the Tsar had been. A lot of these people went through some quite drastic things to survive and to escape, like illegally crossing borders, jumping off of a ship, forging identity cards, deserting the Army, and bribing officials, but they had to take these extraordinary measures because the idea of freedom was so very important to them. Many of them settled in places with large Russian colonies, such as London, Paris, Prague, Belgrade, Poland, Harbin (in China), Israel, the United States, Vienna, Germany, and Bulgaria, though some of them escaped to other places (at least temporarily), such as North Africa and Turkey. I loved almost all of the stories and found very few boring or uninteresting.
   
   Since this is partly a Michael Glenny book, though, there were some things that kind of annoyed me, albeit not so much they totally overwhelmed my overall enjoyment. For example, does anyone under the age of 100 still seriously use unnecessarily gendered words like "citizeness," "poetess," or "Jewess," or make superfluous references such as "a lady congregant" or "a woman cook"? Since a lot of these interviews were translated, I'm assuming that such dated sexist expressions were the work of the translators and not the speakers. (Unlike a lot of other languages, English is not a gendered language!) The chapter on the Dowager Empress's lady-in-waiting also employed the extremely archaic custom of capitalising all royal pronouns, which seems extremely distracting and pretentious today. It might have been considered proper a hundred years ago, but the language has evolved since! Stalin's date of death is twice given as 6 March 1953, when everything else I've ever read gives it as the fifth of March. I have also never seen my favorite writer's wife referred to as "Natasha Solzhenitsyn." In the nearly twelve years I've been reading his work and learning about his life, I've only ever seen her called Alya Svetlova! Still, considering what a great resource the book is, those are admittedly comparatively minor points, however annoying and distracting. Obviously, references to and remarks about "current" events and realities in the Soviet Union are today going to be ever-more-distant history, but such is to be expected with just about any historical book; parts of it will inevitably become dated as time marches on.