I dunno if it’s a product of my interests, or being the child of parents born in the 50s, but I’ve always loved a good tale set in Russia, especially ones taking place around the revolution. I picked this one up on a whim after seeing it recommended, and was compelled to power through it this week. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
And I figured, if I’m on the subject of fiction set in Russia, I might as well recommend my other two favorites. The first is set in and around the siege of Leningrad during WWII.
The second is a collection of increasingly related short stories following a group of characters throughout the fall of the Soviet Union and into the Chechen Wars.
I’m just finishing up Dan Hampton’s Lords of the Sky. I have read his “Viper Pilot” book which was excellent (although he comes across as being kind of arrogant in that memoir).
Lords of the Sky is actually an excellent history lesson. Easy to read with some exciting descriptions of air combat and an insight into some of the well known fighter pilots from the 1st World War up until the early 2000’s, as well as the politics that lead to the different conflicts.
Highly recommended. I already have his book The Hunter Killers loaded on my Kindle App. Looking forward to getting into that one too.
This was my companion through sixteen hours of driving yesterday. I cannot recommend it enough. The author shies away from a formal, academic history text, and instead tries to paint broad the experience of everyday life of Soviet Citizens. The book is long form interviews with everyone she can find: Doctors, Protestors, Intelligentsia, Nomenklatura, Soldiers, Professors, Students, Party Apparatchiks, Teenagers, Mothers, Wives, Husbands, Peasants, Survivors of the gulag and exile, bolsheviks and the new russians. The interviewed discuss the purges, The War, perestroika, the august putsch, the shock of the 90s, the wars in Georgia, Armenia and Central Asia, their lives and those they’ve lost, the utter confusion and thousands of conflicting conclusions taken from the fall of Communism, of the new obsession with Stalin. The older generations lament all their sacrifice to create what they believed would be utopia could fall within two generations. The younger generations lament the state of their country and the betrays of Yeltsin, Gorbachev and Gaidar, perceived or real. It’s a populist history of the 20th Century in Russia, and it’s both endearing and utterly fascinating.
I love history and I love podcasts. The History of Rome and Revolutions are my favourite as they are for many people. Mike Duncan, the author of both wrote a book.
