List Price: $14.95Amazon.com's Price: $14.65 You Save: $0.30 ( 2%)Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 957
EAN: 9780060953737
ISBN: 006095373X
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: January 01, 2001
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: December 26, 2000
Sales Rank: 295129
Studio: Harper Perennial
Related Items:
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
As mysterious as its beautiful, as forbidding as it is populated with warm-hearted people, Syberia is a land few Westerners know, and even fewer will ever visit. Traveling alone, by train , boat, car, and on foot, colin Thubron traversed this vast territory, talking to everyone he encountered about the state of the beauty, whose natural resources have been savagely exploited for decades; a terrain tainted by nuclear waste but filled with citizens who both welcomed him and fed him--despite their own tragic poverty. From Mongoloia to the Artic Circle, from Rasputin's village in the west through tundra, taiga, mountains, lakes, rivers, and finally to a derelict Jewish community in the country's far eastern reaches, Colin Thubron penetrates a little-understood part of the world in a way that no writer ever has.
Amazon.com Review: In Siberia explores a region of astonishments, where "white cranes dance on the permafrost, where a great city floats lost among the ice floes, where mammoths sleep under glaciers." Colin Thubron's latest chronicle also delivers its subject from rumor into reality. An expanse larger than the entire United States, Siberia is undoubtedly a country of contrasts, which elicits from the author both awe and melancholy. Here on one hand is a northern wilderness "shattered into a jigsaw of ponds and streams," and on the other a "black detritus of factories and ruins." No less memorable than the landscape are the people that Thubron encounters. He gathers their stories like rough jewels, showing us a self-proclaimed descendant of Rasputin, an isolated Jewish community, and a parade of "indestructible babushkas."
Woven among the often bitter and eroding memories of a Siberian past is a sense of new freedom. After all, this is the first time in Russia's history when foreigners can travel freely throughout the region--and its inhabitants can comment openly about their government without fear of reprisal. Thubron coaxes an institute official at the Akademgorodok Praesidium to speak his mind: His face was heavy with anger. "We have one overriding problem here. Money. We receive no money for new equipment, hardly enough for our salaries. There are people who haven't been paid for six months." Then his anger overflowed. He was barking like a drill sergeant. "This year we requested funds for six or seven different programmes! And not one has been accepted by the government! Not one!"
Thubron's portrait is as elegant as it is evocative. But just as notably, his journey to the east manages to break the long and destructive Siberian silence. --Byron Ricks
Average Rating: 
Rating: -
Colin Thubron takes you right into Siberia with him. And with him, you can experience the hardships and the love of the land that these people face. This is not a tourist book. It is a book about people, interwoven with geographic fact.
Rating: -
What on earth drives Colin Thubron? Why, traversing a subcontinent whose name has become synonymous with suffering, would he face tedium, banality and appalling weather to seek out agonizing communities, explore Artic death camps, plumb the worldview of demoralized individuals and contemplate remote sites where dramatic events unfolded years, if not millennia, ago? Certainly there is an unrelenting fascination with the mysterious heart of Eurasia, crisscrossed at least three times by the Russian ... Read More
Rating: -
I thought that the depiction of Siberia was magical, and would certainly recommend this book to those that have not read it yet. For those who have, and are interested in more about this land, I would recommend Tent Life in Siberia: An Incredible Account of Siberian Adventure, Travel, and Survival.
Rating: -
We found Colin Thubron at least the equal of Newby and Theroux with the confidence to depend on his unique description skills without photographic backup. What puts this book among the top few is his commitment to the language which permitted him to hear first hand the concerns of those he met, which he reported while allowing the readers to draw their own conclusions. This is an essential reference for inclusion among the few strictly necessary aids to travel through a tortured and fragile land. ... Read More
Rating: -
This is a tremendous book, one that I would recommend to anybody that has either spent some time in Siberia or that is simply interested in the region. Indeed, one of the few criticisms that I have is that the book is too short. Thubron glosses over a lot of interesting places. He is undoubtedly more interested in peripheral, off the beaten track places than he is in major cities. He barely describes places such as Novosibirsk, the largest city in Siberia and the third largest in Russia. He similarly ... Read More
|
|
Football Tickets www.ticketsolutions.com - ticket solutions has your nfl football tickets - online orders guaranteed.
|
|
|
Eyewear & Sunglass DisplaysFramedisplays.com offers eyewear and optical frame displays for private consumers as well as retail stores, opticians and other places selling eyewear and sunglasses. Choose among our acrylic displays, display rods, designer frame displays and more.
|
|