5 comments about Lonely Planet Russia, Ukraine & Belarus (Lonely Planet Russia and Belarus).

1. So you have already seen the present and former capital, and now you would like to see the "real Russia", or you have adopted a child from Murmansk, or you are meeting a prospective bride from Magadan (don't laugh--whenever I answer questions from people who are traveling to regions outside of Moscow/St. Petersburg, 80% are going for adoption or marriage!). There are almost no current guidebooks to regions such as Perm, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Volgograd, Crimea, Minsk, and the Far East. The 'Lonely Planet Russia, Ukraine & Belarus (Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, 2Nded)' has the largest area coverage of any guide currently published in English.

   It is also ideal for those taking a river cruise between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

   The coverage of the famed Trans-Siberian route is ok, although I think the 'Trans-Siberian Handbook' and 'Siberian Bam Guide : Rail, Rivers & Road' do a better job for those particular regions.

   The Moscow/St. Petersburg sections are ok as well, although I think anyone spending more than a few days in each of those cities should look into guides that cover only those cities.

   Restaurant, hotel and travel information are good, although could use more details. The history sections are adequate considering the scope of the book. Also, the twice-yearly updates at Lonely Planet's web site, although lacking in breadth and depth, provide some more timely information than what appears in the book.




2. If you are planning only for staying in Moscow and St. Petersburg or want to travel with the Transibirian Train, don't use the book - there are better ones. This guidebook has it's strength certainly for the broad (and thus mostly not very deep) information and it is quite all right if you are travelling AROUND in Russia and visit also some of the smaller cities.

   A fine thing I found out was the (sometimes a little too small) maps of nearly every town and the information about how to get to the place and how to leave it again.

   On the other hand, the information about hotels' prices is VERY old and out of date completely. Expect to pay 2 to 4 times more than published in the book, Russia has get more expensive since the book has been written! So it is still better to check for hotels on the internet or to ask taxidrivers to lead you to a cheap one and if there's no place left, just go on with the same taxi to the next one. However if you don't care about paying sometimes around 60 Dollars or more a night then this doesn't matter anyway and the information about the hotels themselves is still right.




3. Any guide which tries to everextent itself by covering a too big an area will shortchange the reader, inspite of the best intensions. This is the case with this nitty-gritty Lonley Planet guide to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. I've found the information for Ukraine far less useful than in Linda Hodges' guide to Ukraine. Lonley Planet treats Russia, Ukraine and Belarus as if it still were part of the same country it was 11 years ago. All three countries have their unique pluses and minuses, and, lets face it, deserve their own individual guides. The reader is not being made aware enough and therefore does not really appreciate the fact that, for example, Russia and Ukraine are very different from one another, and any similarities are far less common than once assumed.What I liked best about the Lonley Planet guide,and the same is true for their other guides, are the details about the obscure and less-known hotels and restaurants.



4. A good and usable guide to the entire Russia is still to be written. There are objective reasons for this - the country is huge, and 99% per cent of its territory has no hope of receiving meaningful numbers of tourists. Covering such an area adequately would be an incredibly difficult and expensive task; there is no travel publisher in the world at the moment willing to invest so much for so little expected in sales.

   People who come to Russia mostly visit Moscow and St Petersburg, although a few also wander to the "Zolotoye Koltso" (Golden Ring) around Volga river - old cities of Vladimir, Suzdal or Uglich. If this is your case, the choice is easy: just pick one of the city guides (DK Eyewitness recommended - really the best, Fodor's Moscow and St Petersburg is also good, or try Rough Guide for less inspired but more exhaustive listings).

   The question is - what to do if you go deeper into the country? Say, places in the Urals, or Russia's Far East? Well, you probably will have to dedicate a lot of effort to picking out nuggets of information from the Internet - preferably armed with some knowledge of the Russian language. Prepare your itinerary bit by bit, seek recommendations, write e-mails to people. It is time-consuming and requires effort, but you do not have a choice if you want to prepare for this trip properly.

   Alternatively (an easy way, but not a good one) - buy this book, but make sure you have a pinch of salt on you. A spoonful of salt, rather. Or better make it a sack of salt. The shortcomings of this book have been noted by others: hopelessly outdated, inaccurate, poorly researched. There is a distinct feeling writers either did not visit some of the places they wrote about or spent very little time there. As for pricing information, you will be better off with a random number generator or a casino roulette than this book. I have never seen a guide where price information would be so disconnected from the reality.

   There is also a matter of certain arrogance and disrespect to local culture, noted by one reviewer. Lonely Planet is famed for not pulling any punches and giving writers a lot of freedom to voice their opinions, but at times the feeling of writers' perceived cultural superiority is over the top.

   So is this book worth buying at all? Well, maybe, if you don't mind carrying around something of very limited practical use. Luggage allowance permitting, you might as well have it - one out of five telephone numbers shown in the book might be still valid, some of the addresses may be accurate. Opening times? Here's rule of thumb: try between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. weekdays, chances are, the place will be open. It may occasionally prove useful, for the absence of a better choice, but please do not have excessive expectations.

   The same is true for Belarus - the country is no more welcoming to travellers than Libya or Sudan, nosy travellers risk imprisonment and serious travel writing is practically non-existent. You can try using Lonely Planet, or you can get an excellent listings magazine Minsk In Your Pocket.

   For Ukraine, choices are better. The country is relatively well-covered by general Eastern Europe guides, there is brilliant Hippocrene Language and Travel Guide to Ukraine (by Linda Hodges and George Chumak), or Ukraine Culture Shock by Meredith Dalton. Generally, you will find Ukraine friendlier to Westerners than Russia or Belarus and, most importantly, not preoccupied by desperate superpower ambitions and constant need to reassert its greatness.

   I gave this Lonely Planet guide one star not only because you have to give it at least one star under Amazon system. The book deserves a star because it attempted to cover Russia, Ukraine and Belarus first. Commendable ambition, but sadly, the result is very poor. Maybe they will put together a better team next time, give it a bit more time and check their writing more meticulously.




5. This has been replaced by an updated edition (which eliminates Belarus). Search for 1740592654, or look under "Our Customers' Advice" above. It is still a great guide for your journey of Discovering Russia.

   It is always best to get the most current guidebook, as attractions, hotels, restaurants and transportation options do often change--AND THEN VERIFY THAT INFORMATION!

   Marc David Miller, Discovering Russia, New York

No comments about The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia.

5 comments about The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist's Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan.

1. Very interesting book, it was amazing how similiar the experience sounded to America in Vietnam.



2. This book differs from many wartime narratives in that the author focuses upon the individuals that he meets, instead of the strategic and tactital campaigns that are usually covered. The author is very descriptive with his accounts, but he often leaves the reader the task of determining the competence of persons being interviewed.
   
   This is not a preachy book, but it still comes across as very intelligent. The only thing left to say is that, This is a good read.



3. A nice book about the Soviet-Afghan War. The author spent the first 100 pages describing the initial invasion. The last 180 pages was spent on the final two months of the war. This is a great contrast. The initial hope of doing their international duty is followed by the final exit of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.
   
   There are a lot of interesting contrasts in this book. First, deserters who end up in America living the good life but looking back at what they lost. Then there are the Soviet troops trying to keep from being the last killed. This followed by Soviet paratroopers going on a murderous binge in the wake of their commander's death. This shows the lack of control after nine painful years of war.
   
   The journalist writes from a Russian perspective. However, he does list some of the problems/issues Russian soldiers created in this country. One wonders whether the West backed the right person in this war as highlighted by subsequent actions. I think this is a great read. The one problem is how the author jumps around in his writing, leading the reader to wonder where the author is in the story.



4. There are actually 2 books combined in "Hidden War". The first is a few years in to the war when the writer a journalist, who has been to the USA several time and knows a bit about the west, writes as a adventure, propaganda piece. He includes the feeling of the soldiers and commanders at the time. Several years pass and the writer has been back to the USA and interviewed several soldiers who have surrendered to the mujahadin and been expatriated to the west. Also Glasnost or Openness is in full force in the USSR. The army is pulling out after 8 years of a war that produced nothing. The change in tone of the second book is sharp when compared to the hope of doing their duty in the first book.
   
   Mistakes are made by people attempting to draw parallels between America's wars in Vietnam or Iraq. This would be a mistake and reading 'Hidden War' would prove this. The United States is not the Soviet Union, decayed and on the brink of collapse. No is the media as tightly controlled as in the first part of this book (the book was written after the Soviet Union imploded, it could not have been published before then). There are no conscripts in the American Army as there is in the Soviet or Russian armies.
   
   This is a good book about a war many in the west have forgotten due to the current war in Afghanistan.



5. I read this book in Husaybah, Iraq on the bloodiest of my three combat tours with Third Battalion, Seventh Marines. The ending is absolutely brutal. It made me question why I was wasting seven months of my life losing the Soviet-Afghan War fifteen years after it'd already ended. Occupations cannot be won. Good book.

4 comments about One Hundred Siberian Postcards.

1. Richard Wirick takes the literary sacred and the nonfiction profane and cracks them together, two eggs in a bowl. Someone needs to talk about what it means to adopt a child, someone needs to talk about Russia in what seems like its posthistorical phase, someone needs to talk about wildflowers, someone needs to talk about the distinct character of Siberia, and quietly through it all, that someone needs to talk about himself. Wirick does all this by skirting round the edges of narrative -- similar to Ben Marcus in his Notable American Women -- and the fact that there is fiber and marrow and heart beneath the words makes it that much more remarkable. A truly transformative book.



2. An adoptive father myself, I found Rick Wirick's book absolutely stunning. You really get to see the strangeness--from both sides (adoptive family and adopted child)--of transnational adoption. The book very sensitively deals with the politics of uprooting a child from her native culture, but it does so in its chosen form: lyrical, elliptical "postcards" sent with some urgency to the global world in which we all live. The writing is exquisite, both historically and culturally informed. Think of Rick Wirick as a poetic ambassador, the kind we ought to employ at the State Department. Do NOT miss this book. It is fabulous.



3. The vignettes of Richard Wirick's Siberian Postcards form a portrait of Russia's outback, a wilderness whose forests, steppes and decayed industrial cities are little known to Westerners fond of nouveau riche Moscow and St. Peterburg. Wirick, who adopted an infant daughter from a Siberian orphanage in 2005, has schooled himself in the region's history and folklore. He has studied the legends of Siberian shamans, the explorations and conquests of the Cossacks, the crimes committed in the aftermath of the Revolution. His visits to children's homes have given him compelling evidence of the "demographic catastrophe" that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, leaving nearly a million Russian children abandoned in decrepit orphanages. His impressions of Siberia are set down with poetic precision; in his often poignant stories, every word tells. The critical praise offered by English poet Hugo Williams is warranted in Wirick's case: this is, as Williams says, "a brilliantly executed masterpiece."



4. I thought this book was very poetic and interesting. I really like the way Wirick wrote short, inventive vignettes about a place most people think of as a frozen wasteland. His detailed descriptions of faraway people and places enables the reader to imagine life in a world far removed from anything they've ever experienced. He obviously did some extensive research and has captured the true spirit of Siberia, both past and present. His glorious command of the English language was imaginatively used to paint vivid pictures of fascinating distant cultures and lands.

4 comments about Clarion of Midnight: Megali Idea.

1. I am a Kristina O'Donnelly fan; have read all her other novels. Clarion of Midnight - Megali Idea is the second novel in ber series, Lands of the Morning. For whatever reason, The Horseman, which is the lead novel, and The Scorpion Child, which is the third, were published long before this one. In other words I ended up reading The Scorpion Child two years before I got a chance to read Clarion/Megali Idea. However the good news is that CLARION OF MIDNIGHT - MEGALI IDEA does have its own story line spinning around 3 new characters, Anika, Leyla, and Mark, that makes this novel enjoyable all on its own.
   Also, there is another difference. Both The Horseman and The Scorpion Child contain undertows of mysticism, and reincarnation, ESP, etc. CLARION/MEGALI IDEA is a thriller, earthy and gritty. Turkish politics and their relevance to the United States' interest in that region or the world, are delved into in a no-holds barred manner, and the conflicted, controversial romance between Leyla, the young, beautiful Turkish girl with an American mother, and Mark, the American Jew, is both tender and believable. In fact, I find that Kristina O'Donnelly writes very well and honestly, about the psyche of a man in love and in lust. Or better said, that a man can lust after one woman while still thoroughly in love with another. Mark loves Leyla, fully and sincerely, but has to continuously battle the sexual spell cast upon him by Anika. Wow, what an enchantress is that Anika! Yes her ambitions and brilliance reminds you of Catherine the Great of Russia, and so will her libido.
   
   There is more I'd like to write about this novel but have to return another time. Meanwhile, enjoy arm-chair travel into exotic lands, at its best.



2. I found Clarion of Midnight: Megali Idea to be very power-packed. It offered a dab of everything, from romance to action to history. O'Donnelly is a very talented writer.



3. A thriller and romance all in one.
   Kristina O'Donnelly gives you it all.
   You will love it.



4. Archeologist Mark Cohen is investigating an ancient shipwreck off the Turkish coast when he runs into two beautiful women on a bus. One of these, the powerful Anika Alkibiades, takes an instant liking to Mark, teasing him with her sensual body--and with archeological treasures she claims have been in her family for generations but which he suspects may have been illegally looted from Turkish digs. The second woman, whose identity he does not learn for some time, is the daughter of the Turkish Interior Minister Burhan Bey.
   
   Mark soon finds himself caught up in Anika's plans to restore Greek rule to Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) and to recreate the ancient Byzantine Empire--the Megali Idea. Yet as Mark gets to know Leyla Kayhanoglu, Burhan's half-American daughter, he realizes that Anika's dangerous plan may be the worst thing that can happen to Turkey--and to the anti-Communist alliance. A continuing investigation into past lives and a look into the political turmoil in the Middle East and between Turkey and Greece adds interest to an exciting story.
   
   Author Kristina O'Donnelly continues her LANDS OF THE MORNING series with an action-packed look into a Turkey torn between communists and right-wing Islamists, with a few leaders attempting to hold onto Ataturk's idea of a modern, democratic, and westward-leaning Turkey. Anika's plan is doubly appealing because another empire, the Turkish Ottoman Empire, once ruled virtually the same territory as the Byzantine Empire and, as Burhan points out, Turks, not Greeks, form the heart of what Anika would claim.
   
   In CLARION OF MIDNIGHT, O'Donnelly combines romance with action in a page-turning thriller. You don't need to read THE HORSEMAN, the first novel in this series, but those who have will enjoy seeing Burham continue to deal with his energetic but high-maintenance wife and daughter, as well as the sweet romance between Mark and Leyla.

1 comments about To a Distant Island.

1. In 1890, Anton Chekhov traveled across Russia to the island of Sakhalin to visit a prison colony there and write a book about what he found. The trip was so arduous as to be almost suicidal, and no-one has ever clearly understood why Chekhov desired such a journey.

   James McConkey's To a Distant Island is partially a chronicle of Chekhov's journey, but there is much more to the book than that. McConkey uses Chekhov's letters, the book he wrote when he returned, and various biographies to weave a speculative narrative. There are many gaps in the documentary evidence, and McConkey fills these gaps in with fictional scenes and suppositions, adding color and depth where previously there have only been shadows. He links moments in the journey to Chekhov's own stories and plays with tremendous insight -- indeed, McConkey's odd book offers some of the best literary criticism of Chekhov written in English.

   Additionally, the book is a sort of memoir. McConkey first discovered Chekhov's Sakhalin letters while traveling in Florence and fleeing depression and discontent with his life, a confluence of psychology and situation which allowed him to be particularly empathetic to Chekhov's journey. At first, his discussion of himself within the book seemed anachronistic and intrusive, but I came to enjoy and even relish the memoiristic elements of To a Distant Island as much as I did the material about Chekhov.

   I don't know of another book like To a Distant Island. It is lyrical, surprising, informative, and deeply affecting. Chekhov comes alive far more in this slim volume than in all the hundreds of pages of Donald Rayfield's exhaustive recent biography. This book could serve as a fine introduction to Chekhov's life and works, it could be tremendously fascinating to people who are already familiar with Chekhov, and I expect it would even prove to be a rewarding read for lovers of literature in general who have no particular interest in Chekhov. At the very least, if you appreciate fine writing, you will appreciate this book.

3 comments about Lonely Planet Eastern Europe.

1. I had the fifth edition and thought it would be nice to be up-to-date for my next holiday with this 7th edition. That proved to be a mistake.

   LP has added a lot of countries (the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Moscow and Petersburg) without adding pages. As a consequence the information about the other countries has been reduced. For example Albania went from 40 to 25 pages.

   So if you don't have the guide I can still recommend it because I generally like LP. But if you have an older edition you should think twice about upgrading.




2. I used this book for planning and for advice a one month period of travel through Eastern Europe. Any book that tries to cover so many countries is going to be a compromise between very precise information and a lot of general information. I found that the Lonely Planet Eastern Europe has achieved a good compromise. For example, even a city such as Klaipedia, Lithuania has a few pages written about it even though it is not as popular as Kaunus and Vilnius. However, if you wanted more information about an even smaller city, you are out of luck since just a few cities are mentioned. The history sections are good introductions to each of the countries and the hotel reviews are helpful in planning.

   However, there still is key information missing. Key information such as that you must purchase a ticket for your backpack for the public transportation in Poland or you will be fined. A review of the LP web site shows lots of backpackers complaining about this, but the book does not include the warning.

   Also keep in mind that as Eastern Europe goes through rapid changes with membership in the EU and more and more people visiting, the whole travel industry will be changing. More hotels will be available and more people and places will be more accommodating for people speaking English. Therefore, any guidebook is going to have a difficult time keeping up to date on everything.

   Overall, I would recommend the book for travel through a number of Eastern European countries. However, if you plan to concentrate on just one or two, you may prefer to purchase country specific guides instead so that you have more information.




3. The Lonely Planet Eastern Europe offers the tremendous amount of information that users of the lonely planet have come accustomed to. As always, the history parts are excellent and the maps are lousy.I used the parts about Croatia, Slovenia and Slovakia and found that although this book is good for planning, a lot of information is already outdated. This goes especially for information about museums that turned out to have closed, entrance prices that had doubled and accommodation that was not mentioned. Maybe that is inevitable with a book that covers so many countries, (especially countries going through so many changes) but while travelling it loses much of its practicality. I recommend to use this book to plan your route and then buy extra travel guides for the countries you want to spend some more time in.

No comments about Kazan, the Ancient Capital of the Tartar Khans: With an Account of the Province to Which it Belongs, the Tribes and Races Which Form Its Population, etc.. Volume 2.

No comments about Through Siberia; The Land of the Future (Russia Observed).

1 comments about Stalin's Nose: Travels Around the Bloc.

1. About a third of the way into the book which I began reading during an IVP test for distraction purposes. I am feeling more confused as I go but largely because my historical and geographic knowledge of the region is very limited. I think this is good for me to know(in a hair shirt sort of way). I've read novels set (approximately)in the region and have begun to feel as though I have strayed back into one of them but behind the scenes, drifting through the background unconnected to the story of the novel. However I will continue reading. I am in its thrall, though mystified and chastened by my ignorance.