Xanadu Enterprises Presents a Wondrous Selection of Books
Travel Guides: Russia & The CIS
(This is the First of Three Shelves in this Aisle of the Eurasian Travel Guides Section.)
Category Shelves
The books listed below have been especially selected for those seeking to get the most out of a journey to the former Soviet Union. These are especially useful in terms of understanding the enormous changes that have occurred over the last decade, so that your adventures and explorations there can be absolutely fascinating!
IMPORTANT!
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Trans-Siberian Handbook
by Bryn Thomas, Athol Yates, Tatyana Pozar-Burgar
Synopsis --
This new edition of the guide to the world's longest rail journey is packed with practical information on planning the trip and booking tickets. Background information is also included on Siberia's infamous past and the history of the railway. 30 color photos.
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Russia by Rail
by Athol Yates
Author's Description --
The guide covers over 50 major cities, 300 towns and villages and 24 separate rail routes in Russia, Belarus & Ukraine. The first two chapters provide an overview of the 3 countries and practical preparations for your trip. The third chapter and bulk of this guide is devoted to the major rail routes through the 3 countries. Each route contains information on what you are seeing through the window and the places you pass through. The book covers the following railway lines in detail: * Trans-Siberian * Trans-Mongolian * Trans-Manchurian * Moscow - St Petersburg * Golden Ring * Baikal-Amur Railway * Moscow - Nizhni Novgorod * Moscow - Voronezh - Volgograd - Astrakhan * Moscow - Brest - Warsaw * Moscow - Kiev - Budapest * St Petersburg - Murmansk - Arkhangelsk - Moscow * Moscow, St Petersburg & Kiev surrounding regions * plus numerous branch lines ....
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Open Lands: Travels Through Russia's Once Forbidden Places
by Mark Taplin
Review: Travel Editor's Recommended Book --
Mark Taplin went to Russia in 1984, a junior-level diplomat sent deep into Cold War land. He tells of the map he studied, colored green for the few cities where foreigners were allowed and omnipresent red for "Stay Away." In 1992 Taplin returned. Russia and the U.S. had signed an "Open Lands" agreement allowing free travel, and Taplin wanted to explore the lands that taunted and haunted him from the map eight years before. The result is a book you can't put down, an informed look at a complex country. Russia requires more than a casual eye and pen to sort through the contradictions, and Taplin excels in both.
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Vodka, Tears, and Lenin's Angel:
My
Adventures in the Wild and Woolly Former Soviet Union
by Jennifer Gould
From Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 1997 --
A journalistic Perils of Pauline in what the author breezily
terms the ``FSU'' (Former Soviet Union). After a year spent working for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Gould, a young Canadian
journalist, decided (for reasons that are never made clear) to seek work in the FSU. She doesn't speak Russian and she knows
no Russians, but she nevertheless overcomes all the obstacles. She hangs out with 15-year-old hoodlums, Mafia bosses, and
YILGs (Young Ivy League Gangsters); she is hijacked, visits the scene of strife in Georgia and the front in Chechnya; and she
interviews Vladimir Zhirinovsky on a trip down the Volga. Most chapters are preceded by a pretentious and often not very
relevant quotation from Marcuse or some other intellectual luminary, but the book's political heft can be judged by her
considered view that ``in practice, Russian Communism may have turned out to be a totalitarian tool for continued
state-sanctioned oppression, imperialism and anti-Semitism, but in theory it wasn't so bad. There is a lot of good to found in
reading Lenin.'' This may be why she was given the nickname (which delighted her) of Lenin's Ghost. As her experience of the
FSU deepens, the quality of her reportage improves, and her assessments of the situation in Chechnya and Georgia, while not
very profound, are vivid. So is her portrait of Zhirinovsky, whose emptiness, recklessness, and obsession with sex--he tried in
the course of a taped interview with her, representing Playboy, to persuade her and her translator to engage in group sex with
two of his bodyguards, in front of him- -come through clearly. A wild and woolly picture, indeed, but the main tension in
Gould's gaudy, melodramatic narrative derives from the uncertainty as to whether or not she will suffer an FWTD (Fate Worse Than Death). (8 pages b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Order Waking the Tempests: Ordinary Life in the New Russia
by Eleanor Randolph
Review: Amazon.com --
For two years, Eleanor Randolph, a former Moscow correspondent for the Washington
Post, and now a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, traveled across Russia talking to ordinary people--psychics, priests,
ecologists, sexologists, mail-order brides, gay activists, pensioners, prosecutors, women entrepreneurs, and pre-school
teachers--about life after the introduction of economic shock therapy by President Boris Yeltsin. Her observations are
sobering, and if there is a cultural theme running through this largely bleak picture of the new Russia, it is that of the age-old
Russian conflict between order and freedom being waged at almost every level. "Freedom is wonderful," an elderly and
impoverished couple explained to Randolph, "but you can't eat words."
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The Russian Way: Aspects of Behavior, Attitudes, and Customs of the Russians
by Zita D. Dabars and Lilia Vokhmina
A reader writes:
Very insightful in understanding how to assist Russians in assimilating into American culture and workforce...
Required reading for those doing business in the Former Soviet Union.
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