An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.

Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.

Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Jun Do becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his Korean overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”

Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master’s Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love. A towering literary achievement, The Orphan Master’s Son ushers Adam Johnson into the small group of today’s greatest writers.

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About Adam Johnson

Adam Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories. His other works includeEmporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. He lives in San Francisco.

Editorial Reviews

“Johnson’s novel accomplishes the seemingly impossible: an American writer has masterfully rendered the mysterious world of North Korea with the soul and savvy of a native, from its orphanages and its fishing boats to the kitchens of its high-ranking commanders. While oppressive propaganda echoes throughout, the tone never slides into caricature; if anything, the story unfolds with astounding empathy for those living in constant fear of imprisonment—or worse—but who manage to maintain their humanity against all odds. The book traces the journey of Jun Do, who for years lives according to the violent dictates of the state, as a tunnel expert who can fight in the dark, a kidnapper, radio operator, tenuous hero, and foreign dignitary before eventually taking his fate into his own hands. In one of the book’s most poignant moments, a government interrogator, who tortures innocent citizens on a daily basis, remembers his own childhood and the way in which his father explained the inexplicable: ‘…we must act alone on the outside, while on the inside, we would be holding hands.’ In this moment and a thousand others like it, Johnson juxtaposes the vicious atrocities of the regime with the tenderness of beauty, love, and hope.” – Publishers Weekly

“The Kim Jong Il that we meet in Adam Johnson’s second novel, set in North Korea, is no cartoon villain, no Team America marionette. He’s a three-dimensional character­—a hairsprayed, jump-suited, hopping-mad monomaniac, sure, but a man in whom we can recognize some of our own jealousies and desires. And although he is offstage more often than not in The Orphan Master’s Son, Dear Leader, as he’s usually referred to, is omnipresent in every conversation, every moment of intimacy, every sorrow that takes place somewhere in this fictional DPRK…Johnson is a lunatic story teller … Johnson’s seriocomic method of piling farces upon tragedies upon atrocities doesn’t distance us from the violence so much as make it bearable: His scenes of torture display an unflinching, bone-crunching directness. And yet some of the most affecting scenes are the quieter, scenes of domesticity. Nothing in the book is more poignant than the interrogator’s love for, and fear of, his blind frail parents, whom he suspects of spying on him…Peering into one of the world’s most closed societies, the author has located the similarities between us and them, offering the possibility that we in the United States might be able to relate to the cognitive dissonance North Koreans experience on a daily basis. The idea that we can clearly recognize the people behind that iron curtain—that we can identify with their psychological disconnects—ought to console us, just as it ought to trouble us.” – Bookforum

‘The Orphan Master’s Son’ an audacious, believable tale

The Washington Post Book Review – January 9, 2012 (Excerpt)

A great novel can take implausible fact and turn it into entirely believable fiction. That’s the genius of “The Orphan Master’s Son.” Adam Johnson has taken the papier-mache creation that is North Korea and turned it into a real and riveting place that readers will find unforgettable.

This is a novel worth getting excited about, one which more than delivers on its pre-publication buzz. The setting in remote North Korea is oddly more timely because of the recent death of Kim Jong Il, the “Dear Leader” whose malign spirit hovers over the story like a dark fog. The country’s baby-faced new leader, Kim Jong Eun, the second son of the opera star who was his father’s third spouse, seems almost to walk out of these pages as one of Johnson’s characters; I hope CIA analysts read literary fiction.

Johnson’s book is an audacious act of imagination: an intimate narrative about one of the most closed nations on Earth, a place so shuttered that it concealed the Dear Leader’s death for more than 24 hours. Yet the setting is precisely rendered. The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea’s alternate reality. [Read the full article...]

A North Korean Soldier Finds His ‘Casablanca’

The New York Times Book Review – January 12, 2012 (Excerpt)

North Korea, the Stalinist “hermit kingdom” and one of the world’s most backward and isolated countries, is also a realm where fiction making — state-sponsored storytelling, that is — reigns supreme. At least, that’s how Adam Johnson depicts the dictatorial Communist state in his harrowing and deeply affecting new novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” which recounts the picaresque adventures of its title character, Jun Do, a soldier turned kidnapper turned surveillance officer, who tries to stay alive as he stumbles his way through the government bureaucracy.

Set in the recent past, when the country’s eccentric strongman Kim Jong-il (who died in December) still ruled with an iron whim, the novel conjures an Orwellian world in which the government’s myths about the country — its success, its benevolence, its virtues in taking on the evils perpetrated by the United States, South Korea and Japan — are not only tirelessly drilled into the citizenry through propaganda broadcasts but have also become an overarching narrative framing everyone’s lives. As Jun Do learns, people’s identities are subordinate to the roles the state expects them to fulfill, and even words or acts that inadvertently cast doubt on the greatness and goodness of the government can lead to death or prison or torture.

“Where we are from,” says one character, “stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.” [Read the full article...]

Kim Jong-il’s Romantic Rival

The New York Times Book Review – January 13, 2012 (Excerpt)

The title of Adam Johnson’s second novel is a bit misleading. Raised in the Long Tomorrows orphanage in Chongjin, North Korea, his protagonist believes himself to be the son of the Orphan Master rather than some kid dropped off by his desperate parents. But the primary evidence for this belief — “the unrelenting way the Orphan Master singled him out for punishment” — invites other interpretations. Like the rest of the boys, he is given a name from the list of the 114 Grand Martyrs of the Revolution that will mark him as an orphan for the rest of his life. Pak Jun Do (the given name Jun Do is a homonym of “John Doe”) is appropriate for a character with such a shifting identity, someone who will become both the perpetrator and the victim of countless crimes.

Conscripted into the army after a famine devastates the orphanage, Jun Do patrols the dark tunnels beneath the demilitarized zone before being reassigned to a unit that kidnaps Japanese citizens in night raids. For reasons that are never entirely explained, he is taught English, which leads to a job translating foreign radio transmissions and then to a diplomatic mission to Texas, where he makes friends with a senator’s wife. When that trip ends in disaster, he is sent to a labor camp, where he comes face to face with the diabolical Commander Ga, a national hero and Kim Jong-il’s rival for the affections of an actress called Sun Moon. Jun Do’s training in hand-to-hand tunnel combat helps him defeat Ga, whereupon he takes his place in Pyongyang as Sun Moon’s husband and the father of her children. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

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Drawing on extensive interviews with George Kennan and exclusive access to his archives, an eminent scholar of the Cold War delivers a revelatory biography of its troubled mastermind.

In the late 1940s, George Kennan wrote two documents, the “Long Telegram” and the “X Article,” which set forward the strategy of containment that would define U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union for the next four decades. This achievement alone would qualify him as the most influential American diplomat of the Cold War era. But he was also an architect of the Marshall Plan, a prizewinning historian, and would become one of the most outspoken critics of American diplomacy, politics, and culture during the last half of the twentieth century. Now the full scope of Kennan’s long life and vast influence is revealed by one of today’s most important Cold War scholars.

Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis began this magisterial history almost thirty years ago, interviewing Kennan frequently and gaining complete access to his voluminous diaries and other personal papers. So frank and detailed were these materials that Kennan and Gaddis agreed that the book would not appear until after Kennan’s death. It was well worth the wait: the journals give this book a breathtaking candor and intimacy that match its century-long sweep.

We see Kennan’s insecurity as a Midwesterner among elites at Princeton, his budding dissatisfaction with authority and the status quo, his struggles with depression, his gift for satire, and his sharp insights on the policies and people he encountered. Kennan turned these sharp analytical gifts upon himself, even to the point of regularly recording dreams. The result is a remarkably revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy and always doubted himself.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About John Lewis Gaddis

John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University. His previous books include The United States and the Origins of the Cold War; Strategies of Containment; The Long Peace; We Now Know; The Landscape of History; Surprise, Security, and the American Experience; and The Cold War: A New History. Professor Gaddis teaches courses on Cold War history, grand strategy, international studies, and biography; has won two Yale undergraduate teaching awards; and was a 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal.

Editorial Review

We can be grateful to John Lewis Gaddis for bringing Kennan back to us, thoughtful, human, self-centred, contradictory, inspirational – a permanent spur as consciences are wont to be. Masterfully researched, exhaustively documented, Gaddis’s moving work gives us a figure with whom, however one might differ on details, it was a privilege to be a contemporary. — Henry A. Kissinger New York Times Book Review Kennan’s life maps right onto twentieth-century political history, and no one is better qualified than Gaddis to lead the way through it … Gaddis has written with care and elegance, and he has produced a biography whose fineness is worthy of its subject. — Louis Menand New Yorker Well worth the wait. George F. Kennan: An American Life works brilliantly as a piece of intellectual history, and as a biography of a fascinating and complex man. Fortunately, both Gaddis and Kennan write beautifully. — Gideon Rachman, Financial Times

A New Look At The Man Behind U.S. Cold War Policy

NPR Book Review – December 7, 2011 (Excerpt)

For much of the Cold War, George F. Kennan was America’s best-known diplomat and a leading Soviet scholar. His reputation was based in large part on the 1947 essay he wrote on containment, the Cold War policy that said the U.S. should neither forcefully confront nor meekly appease the Soviets.

Rather, the U.S. should seek to contain Soviet expansion, power and influence in the belief that the communist system would eventually collapse on its own. The U.S. largely adhered to Kennan’s road map until the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991.

John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale historian of the Cold War, had access to Kennan’s diaries, even a dream diary, though he agreed not to publish his work while Kennan was alive. Kennan, who died in 2005, lived to be 101.

By the time Gaddis’ book, George F. Kennan: An American Life, came out last month, Kennan, a man who for so many years needed no introduction, had become someone unfamiliar to a generation of Americans. NPR’s Robert Siegel talked with Gaddis on All Things Considered. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Rosa Achmetowna, the frightening narrator of Bronsky’s dark and wily latest (after Broken Glass Park), is a difficult person to like, much less love. She lives in a cramped Soviet apartment with her husband, teenage daughter Sulfia, and a nosy, disagreeable roommate. Brusque, brimming with bile, and ever judgmental, she is less than pleased when the “rather stupid” Sulfia winds up pregnant. Rosa immediately tries a variety of crude home remedies for aborting Sulfia’s baby—but nine months later, Aminat, is born. Rosa is fundamentally nasty, yes, but she instantly falls in love with Aminat (who coincidentally bears a striking resemblance to Rosa), tries to wrestle Aminat away from Sulfia, and enjoys watching Aminat grow into a wild, willful thing as Rosa and Sulfia kidnap the little girl back and forth. Rosa’s machinations grow increasingly devious until Aminat matures and comes to a crossroads of her own. Rosa is absolutely outrageous, a one-woman wrecking crew with no remorse, an acid tongue, and a conniving opportunist’s sense of drive and desperation. Bronsky lands another hit with this hilarious, disturbing, and always irreverent blitz. – Publishers Weekly

Review

I picked up Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine with anticipation and a little bit of trepidation. I very much enjoyed Bronsky’s first novel, Broken Glass Park and thought it could mark the start of a very promising career. But second novels are challenging, both for the author and for the reader. The author is challenged to live up to the promise of her first work. The reader is challenged by virtue of his or her own heightened expectation and anticipation that the second work will outstrip the qualities of the first novel. Bronsky has met his challenge with ease. Hottest Dishes was a delight to read.

The `heroine’ and narrator of Hottest Dishes is one Rosa Achmetowna. She is one of those forces of nature who, if you met them in real life you’d shake your head after she’d left and sit down while you figured out exactly what hit you. An ethnic Tartar living in the Soviet Union (it appears she may be in Sverdlovsk, Ukraine) in the 1970s, Rosa is single-minded, abrupt and blunt to the point of rudeness and quite singe-minded when it comes to getting what she wants. She is at once hyper-critical and blithely unaware of the impact of her words and actions on the people around her. Told through Rosa’s eyes you get a glimpse of the world as she (and only she) sees it while wincing at her inability to see even for a moment just how toxic she is being. The personality of Rosa in many ways reminded me of the narrator in After Claude (New York Review Books Classics) who was also something of a force of nature in a fine book by Iris Owens.

The book opens with Rosa berating her 17-year old daughter Sulfia. She is hopeless, she is stupid, she’s not nearly as attractive as her mother and she’ll never get a man if she doesn’t change her ways. So Rosa is both astonished and mortified when Sulfia tells her that she’s pregnant and has no idea how it happened. Despite Rosa’s herculean efforts to end the pregnancy using everything from Tartar herbal remedies to a gruesome attempt at an in-house `procedure’ that almost kills her, Sulfia delivers a baby girl, Aminat. Much to her own surprise Rosa notes that Aminat has her Tartar looks and immediately falls in love with the girl. The rest of the book pretty much tracks the adventures and misadventures of three generations of Achmetowna women. Although the book is driven as much or more by strength of narrative than by its plot I think it best to leave it to the reader to discover how their lives progress.

Two things stand out for me. First, I think Bronsky did a terrific job finding Rosa’s voice. Bronsky was born in Russia and moved to Germany with her family as a young girl. Broken Glass Park was narrated in the voice of a young girl, Sascha, who was born in Siberia and moved to Germany as a young girl. Although Bronsky’s life was not at all close to that of Sascha’s I did wonder whether Bronsky could find a different voice that seemed as `true-to-life’ as that of Sascha’s. I had no need to be concerned. Despite her rather unique personality I really felt that I was hearing the thoughts of a real, if very problematic, personality. So, as I became absorbed in the book I could not help but begin to see the world as seen by Rosa with some sense of empathy. By the time I was half-way through the book I was finding Rosa to be almost endearing.

However, and this is second element that stands out for me, first impressions aren’t necessarily correct. I laughed my way through the first half of the book. It was funny and the characters were charmingly toxic. But like a Coen Brothers movie the initial laughter lulled me into a false sense of where the book was heading. What Bronsky has done so well here in terms of both plot and narration is to gradually let things slip out until you reach a point where I just thought “really?” followed shortly thereafter by an “oh my.” What Bronsky does so well here, is to change the tone from comedy to drama in a manner that unfolds almost accidentally.

All in all The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine more than exceeded my expectations. If you prefer your Tartars saucy you will enjoy this book. – Leonard Fleisig, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Book review: ‘The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine’ by Alina Bronsky

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – July 27, 2011 (Excerpt)

You think you’ve got mother problems. Meet Rosa, Tartar matriarch and Mommy Dearest.

Poor Sulfia, 17, lives with Rosa and her father, Kalganow, in a communal apartment somewhere in Russia. Rosa is not above using her considerable charms (she’s quite proud of her good looks) to get what she needs for her family, but she cannot believe how pathetic, passive and helpless they are. “I only hoped that her simplemindedness,” she says of her daughter, “might prove attractive enough to some man that he wouldn’t notice her awful legs until the two of them were already standing in front of a justice of the peace.” It’s possible you’ve never met anyone as self-centered and manipulative as Rosa. And you can’t stop laughing when her transparent schemes for her family’s survival backfire.

No one measures up in Rosa’s estimation, until Sulfia’s extra large stomach turns out to be an unwanted, unexpected pregnancy. The baby, Aminat, is the love of Rosa’s life, the beautiful daughter she never had, her way out of Russia, her hope for the future. To the rest of the world, Aminat is a terror, a spoiled brat, a snotty-nosed urchin. [Read the full article...]

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The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Translated into English at last, Fiasco joins its companion volumes Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child in telling an epic story of the author’s return from the Nazi death camps, only to find his country taken over by another totalitarian government.

Fiasco as Imre Kertesz himself has said, “is fiction founded on reality”–a Kafka-like account that is surprisingly funny in its unrelentingly pessimistic clarity, of the Communist takeover of his homeland. Forced into the army and assigned to escort military prisoners, the protagonist decides to feign insanity to be released from duty. But meanwhile, life under the new regime is portrayed almost as an uninterrupted continuation of life in the Nazi concentration camps-which in turn, is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of  joyless childhood. It is, in short, a searing extension of Kertesz’ fundamental theme: the totalitarian experience seen as trauma not only for an individual but for the whole civilization-ours-that made Auschwitz possible.

Editorial Reviews

“Heroic….Kertész is unique in Holocaust literature….[H]e seems to flaunt the thoughts and feelings that contradict the accepted narrative.”
—Nan Goldberg, The Boston Globe

“[A] powerful book…. If Fatelessness was written with a bright mock-naivety that led to comparisons with Candide, and Kaddish employed the harsh comic rant of Thomas Bernhard, then the presiding ghosts of Fiasco are clearly Beckett and Kafka, those 20th-century masters of confusion and despair.”
—Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine

“Fiasco plays with the art of bearing witness with great risk and proclaims the magnitude of what’s becoming an endangered species, the individual, whose death in this century has been repeatedly proclaimed, celebrated and here, denied.”
–Hans-Harald Muller, Die Welt (Germany)

“We knew Imre Kertesz capable of dry wit  in the most horrific moments, but his representation of the socialist world reveals a great sense of humor that we did not know about…here we all laugh. And we laugh intelligently.”
–L’Express (France)

“An unforgettable novel…a project with strong Kafkaesque and Camus-charged themes.”
–Reinhard Baumgart, Die Zeit (Germany)

Review

Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002. His most famous novel, Fatelessness, has quietly sold many copies, and he is, for a growing community of readers, the most powerful European writer still living.

Despite this, much of his writing remains unpublished in English. Brooklyn based indie press Melville House began to correct this with the publication of several novellas, most notably The Union Jack in 2010. Last month, Melville House published his novel Fiasco, completing the conceptual trilogy begun with Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child.

When asked to describe Kertész’s writing, I usually say he is like Kafka, after Auschwitz. This is an indecent description (though Fiasco is the most Kafkaesque of all his novels), but it is the closet I can come to capturing the darkness and humor and irony of Kertész. Fiasco is a terrifying and occasionally hilarious look at life in Soviet Hungary, told first by an anonymous author (ostensibly Kertész himself) and later by Koves, the protagonist of the anonymous author’s novel. Looming over every paragraph is the question of how lived experience of totalitarianism relates to writing about totalitarianism and the imperative of the writer to write, even in the face of extreme or changing conditions.

Fiasco is as powerful as Fatelessness and deserves to be read just as widely. – DA, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Book review: ‘Fiasco’ by Imre Kertész

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – June 14, 2011 (Excerpt)

In 1944, a 14-year-old boy, future novelist Imre Kertész, was rounded up while on an excursion in the countryside near Budapest and sent to Auschwitz. And then to Buchenwald. Surviving the camps and returning to Budapest, he was asked, simply, by his surviving family and friends, “Where have you been?”

In his work, Kertész reflects on how quickly he discovered that no one really wanted to know what he had experienced. And yet, Kertész’s entire literary life has been an attempt at answering that simple question in the trilogy of novels, “Fatelessness,” “Fiasco” and “Kaddish for an Unborn Child” — an attempt that earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. His other books describe in particular detail his dreary survival under the communism in Hungary.

Finally published in an English translation, “Fiasco” is actually the middle book of the trilogy and describes, in the opening third, the fictionalized experiences Kertész must have had in writing “Fatelessness” — having it rejected by a publisher as being unsuitable for publication. “As I now see clearly, to write a novel means to write for others — among others, for those who reject one,” he muses. The later parts of “Fiasco” follow a writer very much like Kertész who is going about his life in the tediously circumscribed environment of communist Hungary. [Read the full article...]

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Queen of Misfortune

A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Almost Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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Growing up during the cold war in Leningrad, Ellen gets in trouble for not following the rules, and her wry, present-tense narrative, both comic and anguished, is not about political intrigues but about the daily detail of her struggle at home and at school. Of course, the government parallels are always there. As her overbearing, protective mother explains, the official rules are simple: “they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know . . .”

Within the very specific context of the cold war Soviet Union, Gorokhova effectively dramatizes universal teen conflicts. Are duty and personal happiness always mutually exclusive? Or can it be true what Ellen’s aunt says: you can be useful and still care for the beauty of your nails. Eventually Ellen marries an American to get out, and looking back now from her home in New Jersey, her dual perspective is at the heart of the drama, ironic but never cold or simple. There is no word for privacy in Russian, but there is one for isolation. –Hazel Rochman, Booklist

Editorial Reviews

“Elena Gorokhova has written an endearing, sensitive story of her early years in the USSR. Her memoir is proof that the human spirit can triumph even in the most repressive of times.” — Edward Hower, author of The New Life Hotel and The Storms of May

“An honest, captivating story of a girl from a middle-class Soviet family, growing into a young woman, searching for her identity and unable to find it…In the spirit of Dostoyevsky, it is also an endlessly Russian quest for self-redemption…I advise you to read the book. It will give you pleasure.” — Sergei Khruschchev, son of former Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev

“Elena Gorokhova has written the Russian equivalent of Angela’s Ashes, an intimate story of growing up into young womanhood told with equal grace and humor.” — Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate

“What is it about A Mountain of Crumbs that makes it so damn readable? Is it the setting — the Soviet Union in the second half of the last century on the verge of disintegration? Is it the author’s way with the English language? This is a rich experience — a personal journey paralleled by huge national changes and ending in a deeply satisfying portrait of peace in America. Those who have traveled from another place to America will find themselves in this rich memoir.” — Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes

“The story of a young person of sparkling intelligence, full of curiosity about the world, struggling to grow and blossom under a duplicitous, censorious, and unremittingly mean-minded social system. Elena Gorokhova conveys all the ugliness of daily life in Soviet Russia, as well as its humiliations, but is awake to its strangled, submerged poetry too. An enthralling read.” — J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Summertime

“A Mountain of Crumbs is an extraordinary memoir. Elena Gorokhova’s writing — gorgeous and evocative — is enriched by her connection to two languages, Russian and English. Brilliant and moving.” — Ursula Hegi, author of Stones from the River

“This is a diamond of a memoir. Elena Gorokhova captures the essence of a vanished world with a poet’s eye, taking the reader on an unforgettable journey, where every detail transcends the commonplace and every page bears witness to the deepest longings of the human heart. This memoir offers a rare glimpse of life in the former Soviet Union, and also of the universal search for love and autonomy that binds us all together, regardless of time and place.” — Carlos Eire, author of Waiting for Snow in Havana

“Almost painful in its authenticity, this hypnotically readable memoir has the sweep and power of a great Russian novel.” — Bruce Jay Friedman, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and author of A Father’s Kisses and Stern

“[A] deeply affecting memoir . . . recalled with spare, lyrical beauty and wry humor.” —Carmela Ciuraru, More

“A Mountain of Crumbs vividly, devastatingly conveys what it was like growing up in the shabby disillusion of the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union—and also swooningly indulges the nostalgia for place and landscape that’s seemingly steeped into every Russian soul. . . . Marvelous reminiscence.” —Ben Dickinson, Elle

Review

“I think of my mother, the one in the portrait her brother painted before he died (in the Great Patriotic War) … But what is it that wiped the smile off her face and dimmed the luster in her eyes? Was it the war, the wayward husbands, the two dead brothers? Or did it happen later, when my father got sick and needed a hospital and they refused to admit him? My mother knocked on the door of every party boss in Leningrad, until finally one issued an order to let him in for one week. A special ukaz …” – Elena Gorokhova

“I think of the dream I had about (my father) when I was eight, in which he sat in his rowboat and spoke about theater, about the audience holding their breath and growing silent the moment before the curtain is about to go up. The anticipation of magic, he called it, the expectation of illusion. The moment when the noise stops. The moment when you’re no longer ordinary.” – Elena Gorokhova

Elena Gorokhova was born in 1955 in Leningrad (before and after the Soviet era, St. Petersburg) of a physician mother and her third husband, a Communist Party apparatchik. At twenty-four, Elena immigrated to the United States. In 2008, she wrote A MOUNTAIN OF CRUMBS, an account of her life from age five to her emigration from the Motherland.

Skipping through the years of her life in Leningrad a year or two at a time, Gorokhova’s chronicle includes such experiences more or less unique to a Soviet (as opposed to an American) citizen: her induction into the Young Pioneers, hunting for mushrooms in the forest, lengthy store queues for basic foodstuffs, serving as a Leningrad tour guide, restrictions against unsanctioned contact with foreigners, vacationing with peers on the Crimean seashore, and teaching Russian to American exchange students at Leningrad University. But her narrative also includes activities that transcend borders, politics and cultures – activities familiar to those, such as myself, who grew up in the United States of the 50s, 60s and 70s: classroom drop and cover drills in anticipation of a Cold War nuclear blast, the dreaded childhood appointment with the dentist, a visit to the grandparents’ rural homestead, the confused and frustrated curiosity about sex, the adolescent schoolyard crush, the first job, parental opposition to one’s chosen career, the tyranny of low-level bureaucrats, and the petty spitefulness of co-workers.

For the Western reader, Elena’s winning story provides a window on urban life in the European half of America’s and Britain’s most formidable Cold War adversary. Gorokhova’s memoir should remind us of the basic commonality of the human experience regardless of ideological and political differences.

A MOUNTAIN OF CRUMBS has, however, two flaws that cause me to knock off a star. Elena became infatuated with the English language, and mastering it became her academic major. With such came a desire to at least visit, if not immigrate to, the West. Yet, nowhere in the book is the genesis of this relationship with English explained. One can only infer from the effect pending marriage to an American student had on her mental attitude and self-perceived place in Soviet society:

“I’m glad I’m marrying (Robert) because I like his foreignness. I like that he represents the forbidden and the unknown, that his nationality makes people gasp. I like that Robert has lifted me above the collective and now I can be the opposite of what we all are here, cynical and meek … I like that I am no longer, as I was in (the) third grade, a yearning Pioneer vying for attention … I think of my imminent marriage as a play with a punch-line ending that is going to stun the English Department of Leningrad University into near unconsciousness … students will whisper in the hallways, voices tinged with respect and envy.”

Disillusionment with life in the U.S.S.R, the rulers of which promised so much and delivered so little to nourish the inner spirit? Most certainly that.

Finally, Elena’s subsequent life in the U.S. since 1979 rates only a three-page Epilogue. After so many years waiting for the curtain to rise, did she find magic and illusion in her new home? What was it like to wander an American supermarket and chain-bookstore with all their abundance for the first time? How did the reality of Western economic strata compare with strident Soviet claims? How did she react to the open and rambunctious U.S. political process? What was her first impression of American road traffic? She doesn’t say. Perhaps the author is saving that part of the story for a sequel. I think she owes the reader an answer to those questions after such an engaging build-up. – Joseph Haschka, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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Queen of Misfortune

A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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Russia has long been a source of puzzlement— and sometimes alarm—for Western observers. Since shaking off communism two decades ago, the country has seemed wobbly at best, thoroughly corrupt and threatening at worst. But in recent years, as noted scholar Daniel Treisman shows in this compelling account, Russia has re-emerged as a pivotal nation in world affairs. In The Return, Treisman cuts through the myths and misinformation, as well as ongoing academic and journalistic debates, to present a portrait of a strong and independent country that is returning to the international community on its own terms.

Drawing on two decades of research, interviews, and insider observation, The Return provides the first comprehensive history of post-communist Russia. From Gorbachev to Yeltsin, Putin, and Medvedev, it traces the twists and turns of the country’s evolution, uncovering the causes behind Russia’s plunge into depression in the 1990s and resurgence since 2000. Rather than a nation frozen in ancient authoritarian traditions, as Russia is often portrayed, Treisman shows a society modernizing rapidly, with a government that, although less than democratic, is sensitive to public opinion but which has been repeatedly buffeted by economic forces—the collapse of Soviet planning, the gyrations of oil prices—that have alternately boosted and drained the leaders’ popularity. Knocked off balance once again by the global financial crisis, the Kremlin’s current bosses must now struggle to reignite the growth on which the stability of their regime depends.

As Russia grapples with its economic difficulties, the West will have to come to terms with the new Russia. With its UN Security Council veto, thousands of atomic warheads, continental dimensions, and vast mineral resources, Moscow sits at the epicenter of the toughest challenges the world will confront in the next generation—from Islamic terrorism and nuclear proliferation to energy security and global warming. To enlist Russia’s cooperation in solving the problems of the twenty-first century, Western leaders will need to look beyond common misconceptions to see the country as it is rather than as it has often been imagined or depicted.

Based on extensive research by an expert with intimate knowledge of the country, the book provides insight into the prospects for democracy in Russia, the challenges and opportunities of doing business there, the wars in Chechnya, and the motives behind Moscow’s foreign policy. The Return is the ultimate accounting of what Russia is today, how it got there, and where it’s going.

Editorial Reviews

“This excellent book provides both an elegant and comprehensive account of Russia’s turbulent history over the last quarter century and penetrating and sometimes surprising analyses of the main political and economic issues that that history raises.” –Michael Mandelbaum, author, The Frugal Superpower: America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era

“Daniel Treisman treats us to an elegant and learned history that demystifies Russia’s transformation from a communist state to a normal country. This is the best and most readable account of Russia’s rebirth.” –Anders Åslund, Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics

“Daniel Treisman has written a book about Russia today that is calm, sane, judicious, very well informed, and written in the kind of prose that makes you want to read on. It is a welcome and necessary antidote to much fashionable Western writing that portrays Russia as a kleptocracy ruled by a secret policeman intent on victory in a new Cold War…. Russia has certainly returned. Whether we like it or not we are likely, if we want to achieve our own objectives, to find ourselves having to treat the Russians with the respect they believe they deserve, and can increasingly command.” –Rodric Braithwaite, former UK ambassador to the Soviet Union and Russia, author of Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside Down and Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War

“Possessing both deft storytelling abilities and deep scholarly knowledge, Treisman provides a truly masterful exposition of the tumultuous past two decades in Russian history, politics, and society. Anyone interested in Russia and its leaders should read this book.” –James Goldgeier, George Washington University

‘The Return’ delves into the enigma of Russia

The Boston Globe Book Review – January 11, 2011 (Excerpt)

Winston Churchill famously described Russia as a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’’

Although that country has undergone a massive political and economic transformation in the 71 years since Churchill made that statement in a radio address, the West continues to struggle to understand that important country.

In “The Return,’’ Daniel Treisman has made an important contribution to narrowing the knowledge gap. It is an opinionated primer and valuable tour d’horizon of recent Russian history.

Treisman, a political science professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, provides thumbnail sketches of all the Russian leaders during that period and also discusses the details of key domestic and foreign policy changes. [Read the full article...]

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Imperator

The Life of Gaius Julius Caesar

A Novel by Philip Katz

“Imperator – The Life of Gaius Julius Caesar” by Philip Katz is a fictional recreation of the life of the greatest of all Romans, Gaius Julius Caesar. It is a personal memoir, the inside story of his world as viewed through his eyes, written in the first person, suppressed by Caesar’s successors, only to be rediscovered in modern times. [More...]

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The acclaimed labor lawyer and prizewinning author Thomas Geoghegan asks: where are we better off—America or Europe? In an idiosyncratic, entertaining travelogue that plays on public policy, Geoghegan asks what our lives would be like if we lived them as Europeans. Sneaking out of his workaholic American life, he takes five trips where he tries to understand so-called European socialism firsthand. Though he first tries France (which has become a rhetorical stand-in for the continent as a whole in many Americans’ minds), he eventually ventures into Germany to see what some call the “boring” Europe.

There he finds the true “other”—an economic model with more bottom-up worker control than that of any other country in the world—and argues that, while we have to take Germany’s problems seriously, we also have to look seriously at how much it has achieved. Social democracy may let us live nicer lives; it also may be the only way to be globally competitive. This wry, timely book helps us understand why the European model, contrary to popular neoliberal wisdom, may thrive well into the twenty-first century without compromising its citizens’ ease of living—and be the best example for the United States to follow.

Germany is more generous than the U.S.:
The average number of paid vacation days in the U.S. is 13, versus Germany’s 35.
New mothers in the U.S. get three months of unpaid job-protected leave and only if they work for a company of 50 or more employees, while Germany mandates four months’ paid leave and will pay parents 67% of their salary to stay home for up to 14 months to care for a newborn.
U.S. life expectancy is 50th in the world, compared to Germany’s 32nd.

Review

As a Harvard-educated labor lawyer, Geoghegan is acutely aware of how frayed and tattered the social contract has become. Companies close down factories and wreck communities. The workers are left with little to nothing. Globalization forces the business to find cheaper labor in Mexico, China or Viet Nam. It’s a constant race to the bottom if you are in a high-wage country. Well, maybe not, and that’s the strange interplay of sacrifice and hope when we look at the future of American labor.

Geoghegan sees the European Model of Social Democracy as a beacon in the Western World. Germany offers a prime example. Once ridiculed for its rigid model of union-management partnerships, huge social safety net and six-week vacations, Germany seems to have evaded the ugliest aftershock of globalism.

In the European “worker-first” system, both mothers and fathers get paid leave after the birth of a child; work weeks are shorter, there’s lots of vacation time (three times as much as the US), nursing home benefits, national health care and workers who are not only allowed to work with management — but sit as active members in boardroom decisions.

Is this the horrible socialist peril that ravaged the Soviet Union? Hardly. Social democracy thrives. The Germans have an export surplus, high productivity, a vibrant manufacturing base and low debt. They didn’t suffer from a housing meltdown and their banks didn’t need bailing out. Of course, German unemployment is still a problem (although it’s a few points lower than the US) and taxes are high, yet look what they get for their public-sector dollars.

In the US, even after health and financial reform, we are still hostage to the private insurance industry (with a lot more consumer safeguards) while the biggest banks have grown bigger still to corner even more investment capital.

What about those big, evil European Unions? In Germany, the unions have protected benefits instead of bargaining them away just to survive. Germans have high savings rates and pension plans not tied to the stock market. “Most Germans have big supplements from collective bargaining,” writes Geoghegan. In the US, unionized workers are clinging to mostly government sector jobs. The white collar workforce has to deal with endless work without pay, shrinking benefits and uncertain pensions, which are underfunded to the tune of $260 billion.

If Americans can somehow get around the dogma that we must be the world’s supercop, suppress unions at all cost and assume that corporate interests have primacy, we might be able to see the light that social capitalism — profits generated in the public welfare — could work. Obama has certainly tried, only to run into the relentless buzzsaw of corporate-funded propaganda and misplaced Tea Party rants. So I doubt if Geoghegan will change any minds, but his way of illuminating the disparities between corporate capitalism and social capitalism is nothing less than brilliant.

– John F. Wasik, author “The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream (Bloomberg): Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream” (Bloomberg Press, 2009)

“Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life” by Thomas Geoghegan

The Chicago Tribune Book Review (Excerpt)

When Chicago author and labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan interviews a German banker in his new book “Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?” he asks why, if things are bad in Germany, the restaurants are full.

The banker replies by quoting Norbert Walter, famous in economic circles as the former chief economist of Deutsche Bank, who summarized the situation this way: “We Germans are worse off . . . but at higher and higher levels.”

Germans have suffered in the global economic crisis like everyone else, but Geoghegan points out that while New York and London won the race to be money centers in attracting international capital that turned out to be a saving grace for the Germans. Their financial sector did not bloat beyond recognition, there were no bubbles of reckless loans and excessive debt, and in hindsight much of the financial press reported, “We mocked them for losing out, when really they were lucking out.” [Read the full article...]