I have been a scholar of Orthodox Christianity for more than 20 years; & authored or (co-)edited several books. It took the fall of communism to overcome the relative poverty of Western literature & gain better knowledge of the Orthodox religious landscape. Personally, I am interested in the relationship between Orthodoxy and culture/politics. This relationship runs deep into the heart of several Orthodox nations – as the war in Ukraine aptly demonstrates. By the 21st century, Orthodox Christianity is no longer exclusively affiliated with its historical birthplace of Eastern and Southeastern Europe but there are millions of Orthodox Christians in North America and Western Europe.
Νumerous books about the troubled relationship between Russia and the West. But it is extraordinarily challenging to manage to condense the history of a rich and varied relationship within a few hundred pages.
In this book, the author succeeds in covering several centuries of history and numerous complicated topics and subtopics within the span of fewer than 300 pages.
A splendid work precisely because it is concise, it covers the history of this relationship from Medieval times up to the modern era.
In 1997, the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer in Moscow was solemnly brought into use in the presence of Patriarch Aleksij and President Boris Yeltsin. It is a spectacular expression of the national religious revival of Russia and the expression in stone of a myth cherished by Russians down their history, that Moscow is the 'third Rome' and that Christianity and civilization have moved eastwards. At the same time, Russia has always formed part of the European cultural sphere.
The tensions between the 'myth of the East' and Russia as European form a fascinating story which is investigated here. The…
I’ve been into spy stories for many years. I love the intrigue, the deception, the secrecy of that world. Of course, real spying may involve lots of periods of doing nothing, possibly followed by manic, dangerous action. All while dealing with the anxiety of hiding the fact that you might be a traitor to your country or simply not the person the world thinks you are. It’s a fascinating world, and that fascination is what draws me in.
I really love the characters in this book. It’s the fourth book in a series, but I read this out of order, which meant I didn’t have the benefit of some of the backstory for one or two people. This is a story of treachery and betrayal, and spies that stay in the game for years before getting out or getting caught.
From "quite possibly the best historical novelist we have" (Philadelphia Inquirer), the fourth Joe Wilderness spy thriller, moving from Red Scare-era Washington, D.C. to a KGB prison near Moscow's Kremlin
In Moscow Exile, John Lawton departs from his usual stomping grounds of England and Germany to jump across the Atlantic to Washington, D.C., in the fragile postwar period where the Red Scare is growing noisier every day.
Charlotte is a British expatriate who has recently settled in the nation's capital with her second husband, a man who looks intriguingly like Clark Gable, but her enviable dinner parties and soirees aren't…
With my debut comedic travel memoir having come out in April, I read every humorous travel book I could get my hands on both as part of my education for inspiration on how to write my book and before I even knew I was going to write a book because I simply love reading these types of stories. From my own experience, travel has made me grow so much as a person, and all of these authors beautifully capture their own journeys and how travel helped them find their way.
Coming from a standup comedy background, Murray captures her quest across Central Asia, inspired by her love of Russian men.
Through some scary moments, nearly getting kidnapped to more hilarious ones performing standup in front of a crowd that speaks a different language than her own, she is fun to travel with and always has a hilarious anecdote to share.
The raucous and surprisingly poignant story of a young, Russia-obsessed American writer and comedian who embarked on a solo tour of the former Soviet Republics, never imagining that it would involve kidnappers, garbage bags of money, and encounters with the weird and wonderful from Mongolia to Tajikistan.
Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Siberia are not the typical tourist destinations of a twenty-something, nor the places one usually goes to eat, pray, and/or love. But the mix of imperial Russian opulence and Soviet decay, and the allure of emotionally unavailable Russian men proved strangely irresistible to comedian Audrey Murray.
The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers, soon to be a major television series
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Rules of Civility, a beautifully transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel
In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and…
Since I brought home my first rescue thirty years ago, my life has been full of dogs and dog-related activities that I can hardly imagine the person I would've been without them. My own books often feature one or more dogs, not because I particularly decide to write about dogs, but more because I live with dogs, it’s what I know. When I’m browsing for a good read, if a book features a dog, that’s a draw for me, just because dogs are dogs; they are such good creatures, so infinitely lovable, that their presence enhances a book for me just as their presence in my life enhances my every day.
Of all my picks, this one is the most startling read, I think. It follows the life of a very small boy, left for some reason abandoned, who takes refuge with a stray bitch and her litter, and consequently grows up as a dog.
This, too, is very much a tragedy; although he lives as a dog, and everything he knows is of being a dog, yet the boy is not a dog and cannot remain one, and his own complete failure to understand his circumstances when he is rescued results in one of the most heartbreaking endings to any book I have ever read.
It’s a strange and beautiful experience, reading this book, and although yes, it will break you, it gives a rare insight into how it can be for anyone brought up outside his proper culture.
A vivid, riveting novel about an abandoned boy who takes up with a pack of feral dogs
Two million children roam the streets in late twentieth-century Moscow. A four-year-old boy named Romochka, abandoned by his mother and uncle, is left to fend for himself. Curious, he follows a stray dog to its home in an abandoned church cellar on the city's outskirts. Romochka makes himself at home with Mamochka, the mother of the pack, and six other dogs as he slowly abandons his human attributes to survive two fiercely cold winters. Able to pass as either boy or dog, Romochka…
I’m a Scottish journalist. In the 1980s, I studied German at Karl-Marx University in Leipzig, East Germany. It was a fascinating experience that changed my perceptions of the world. I didn’t become a communist, but I did begin to see that where you stand depends on where you sit and that principles are easy to maintain when it costs you nothing to do so. There was a bleak glamour to East Germany that I loved, and so I decided to set my first novel in the shadowy world of intense personal connections, underground artists, and unofficial informers that I’d found in Leipzig.
Set in 1955-56, The Architects by German-Jewish author Stefan Heym is a rare find. It delivers a stark portrait of East Germany in the period around Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin, which Heym lived through. The author uses the politics of architecture to expose hypocrisy and personal jealousy in the new “anti-Fascist” German state. At the heart of the book is a devastating personal betrayal that gives the lie to communist claims of moral superiority. Written in the 1960s’, The Architects is a searing critique of the New Germany by a convinced socialist. This helps explain why Heym wrote it in English and did not publish it until 2000, a year before his death, in his own German translation.
Written between 1963 and 1966, when its publication would have proved to be political dynamite - and its author's undoing - this novel of political intrigue and personal betrayal takes readers into the German Democratic Republic in the late 1950s, shortly after Khruschev's ""secret speech"" denouncing Stalin and his methods brought about a ""thaw"" in the Soviet bloc and, with it, the release of many victims of Stalinist brutality. Among these is Daniel, a Communist exile from Hitler who has been accused of treachery while in Moscow and who now returns to Germany after years of imprisonment. A brilliant architect,…
Steven G. Marks is a historian who has written extensively on Russian economic and cultural history, the global impact of Russian ideas, and the history of capitalism. He received his PhD from Harvard University and has spent more than 30 years teaching Russian and world history at Clemson University in South Carolina.
Karl Schlögel’s masterpiece, Moscow,1937, is a gripping study of Moscow at the peak of the Stalinist Great Terror. With short chapters and a multitude of illustrations, the book leads the reader on a panoptic tour of every aspect of the city’s life in this year of mass arrests and waves of executions. Step by step, Schlögel builds a convincing case that as the Communist regime struggled to get a grip on the chaos unleashed by the regime’s own collectivization and industrialization drives, its reflexive response was to resort to political violence. The murderous frenzy that resulted changed the society beyond recognition.
Moscow, 1937: the soviet metropolis at the zenith of Stalin s dictatorship. A society utterly wrecked by a hurricane of violence. In this compelling book, the renowned historian Karl Schlogel reconstructs with meticulous care the process through which, month by month, the terrorism of a state-of-emergency regime spiraled into the Great Terror during which 1 1/2 million human beings lost their lives within a single year. He revisits the sites of show trials and executions and, by also consulting numerous sources from the time, he provides a masterful panorama of these key events in Russian history. He shows how, in…
This
is a wonderfully lively and revealing investigation into the life and work of Anton
Chekhov. The book is also partly the
story of Janet Malcolm’s pilgrimage to the cities in Russia where
Chekhov lived and worked.
Her reading
of Chekhov’s work is complemented by events from Chekhov’s personal life and
letters. I have been a fan of Janet
Malcolm for years because I’m captivated by her searing intelligence, her keen
eye, and her ironic wit.
On her
pilgrimage to Russia, Malcolm’s complicated relationship with her controlling Russian
guide offers some truly hilarious moments.
To illuminate the mysterious greatness of Anton Chekhov’s writings, Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer, and journalist. Her close readings of the stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from Chekhov’s life and framed by an account of Malcolm’s journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yalta. She writes of Chekhov’s childhood, his relationships, his travels, his early success, and his self-imposed “exile”—always with an eye to connecting them to themes and characters in his work. Lovers of Chekhov as well as those new to his work will be transfixed by Reading Chekhov.
History has always been my passion. Since I was 16, I tried to understand the world around me and the forces that shaped it. I thought that history as a discipline provided the best answers. In the 1970s, because of the official anti-Semitism, it was impossible to get into the history department programs at the Soviet universities. Nonetheless, I resolved to study history after my emigration to the US in 1979 and joined a graduate program at the University of Chicago. For four decades I have been writing about Russian history, although I also read, teach, and write on global history.
A brilliant novel set in 1990s Russia. The plot involves Stalin and one of his deep secrets. The author seamlessly moves the story from the 1930s to 1990s and back. One rarely sees a historical novel so accurate in capturing the historical events and so utterly captivating. It is on par with some of the best thrillers.
_______________________________________ 'With Archangel, Robert Harris confirms his position as Britain's pre-eminent literary thriller writer' The Times
'He has a talent for heart-poundingly tense story-telling, and an ability to conjure up atmospheres almost palpable with menace' Sunday Times _______________________________________ Deadly secrets lurk beneath the Russian ice.
Historian Fluke Kelso is in Moscow, attending a conference on recently unclassified Soviet papers, when an old veteran of the Soviet secret police visits his hotel room in the dead of night. He tells Kelso about a secret notebook belonging to Josef Stalin, stolen on the night of his death.
Writing is my life. As a child I wrote poems, scripts, and short stories. A couple of decades, a BCALA literary award, and a three-book deal later, my wild imagination has grown into a passion for exposing the truth. In 2020, a third of the 300,000 missing women in the United States were Black, and in that same year, I was almost a victim of human trafficking myself. With this second chance, I write to bring awareness and attention to women who cannot speak for themselves. I write to shed light on the truth and these five books have helped me on my journey.
This action-packed spy thriller kept me on edge from the first chapter mostly due to the beautiful prose, but also because it depicts the CIA in an accessible way. The book taught me to analyze people based on not their words or actions, but their intentions. Diving headfirst into the political hierarchy of the esteemed agency, this book highlights that no one—especially the co-worker you sit next to and eat lunch with every day—can be trusted. Fun and fast-paced, Red Widowdrops you in a body of water and just when you think you’re in a swimming pool, you find out you’re in the ocean.
“A wicked sharp spy novel…Equal parts Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Killing Eve.” –S. A. Cosby, author of Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears
An exhilarating spy thriller written by an intelligence veteran about two women CIA agents whose paths become intertwined around a threat to the Russia Division--one that's coming from inside the agency.
Lyndsey Duncan worries her career with the CIA might be over. After lines are crossed with another intelligence agent during an assignment, she is sent home to Washington on administrative leave. So when a former colleague--now Chief of the Russia Division--recruits her for an internal investigation,…
