Marx and Engels invented it; Lenin volunteered Russia for the honour of trying it; the Soviet people had to live with it.. This tongue-in-cheek travel guide is a cherishably witty insight into the chaotic, bewildering and sometimes scary society that resulted from this heroically doomed effort to "build Communism". It teaches you basic Soviet survival skills including how to queue for useless products, bribe your way into empty restaurants and contravene anti-alcohol measures.'The ...

On a mid-summer day in 1937, a car pulled up to the house of the Bibikov family in Chernigov in the heart of the Ukraine. Boris, the father, kissed his two daughters and wife goodbye and disappeared inside the car. His family never saw him again. His wife would later vanish, leaving the young Lyudmila and Lenina alone to drift across the vast Russian landscape as the Wehrmacht advanced in WWII. In the early 1960s Owen Matthews' father, Mervyn, moved to Moscow to work for the British embass...

A journey into the glittering, surreal heart of twenty-first-century Russia, where even dictatorship is a reality show.**“A gripping and unsettling account.” —**Washington PostProfessional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet masters, Hells Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors: welcome to twenty-first-century Russia. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, ch...

A Pulitzer Prize winner's memoir of her search for her enigmatic father is "an absolute stunner . . . probing, steel-nerved, moving in ways you'd never expect" ( New York Times)."In the summer of 2004 I set out to investigate someone I scarcely knew, my father. The project began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had absconded from her life. I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful dodger who had skipped out on so many things—obliga...

Russia is dying from within. Oligarchs and oil barons may still dominate international news coverage, but their prosperity masks a deep-rooted demographic tragedy. Faced with staggering population decline-and near-certain economic collapse-driven by toxic levels of alcohol abuse, Russia is also battling a deeper sickness: a spiritual one, born out of the country’s long totalitarian experiment.In The Last Man in Russia, award-winning journalist Oliver Bullough uses the tale...

The wonders, horrors, and fears of the early twentieth century are brought to life in this beautifully told history.**"Hugely enjoyable and illuminating ... A work of narrative history at its best.” —**GuardianEurope, 1900-1914: a world adrift, a pulsating era of creativity and contradictions. The major topics of the day: terrorism, globalization, immigration, consumerism, the collapse of moral values, and the rivalry of superpower...

Here is a pioneering account of everyday life under Stalin, written by one of our foremost authorities on modern Russian history. Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, Sheila Fitzpatrick shows that with the adoption of collectivization and the first Five-Year Plan, everyday life was utterly transformed. With the abolition of the market, shortages of food, clothing, and all kinds of consumer goods became endemic. As peasants fled the collectivized villages, major cities were soon in the gri...

A distinguished historian and Budapest native offers a rich and eloquent portrait of one of the great European cities at the height of its powers.Budapest, like Paris and Vienna, experienced a remarkable exfoliation at the end of the nineteenth century. In terms of population growth, material expansion, and cultural exuberance, it was among the foremost metropolitan centers of the world, the cradle of such talents as Bartók, Kodály, Krúdy, Ady, Molnár, Koestler, Sz...

"It's just a masterpiece. When I read it I thought, how is it that we don't know about this-how is it that I am the only person I know who's read this book?" Wes Anderson, on Stefan Zweig's Beware of PityContents: *A Conversation with Wes Anderson-*Wes Anderson discusses Zweig's life and work with Zweig biographer George Prochnik. *The World of Yesterday-*Selected extracts from Zweig's memoir, an unrivalled evocation of bygone Europe. *Beware of Pity-*An e...

"I have read few autobiographies more extraordinary . . . Astonishing" OBSERVER"A classic. I preferred it to Primo Levi's If This is a Man" EDWARD WILSON"A child's clear-eyed journey to hell" ANNE SEBBAThis is a story of a young boy's journey from a sleepy provincial town in Hungary during the Second World War to the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen. After a winter in Bergen-Belsen where his father died, he and his...

"Not only a memoir, it's also a fierce reply to those who criticized German-Jewish assimilation and the tardiness of many families in leaving Germany" ( Publishers Weekly).In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, anti-religious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939—"the story," says Peter Gay, "of a poisoning and how I dealt with it." With his customary eloquence and analytic acumen, Gay describes his family, the li...

In mid-career, Michael Frayn took up his old trade of journalism, and wrote a series of occasional articles for the Observer about some of the places in the world that interested him. He wanted to describe 'not the extraordinary but the ordinary, the typical, the everyday', and his accounts became the starting point for some of the novels and plays he wrote later.From a kibbutz in Israel to summer rains in Japan, bicycles in Cambridge to Notting Hill at the end of the 1950...