An extraordinary and beautifully written chronicle that combines the best of different genres: travel writing, journalism, and history. His first book reveals Taplin, a former public-information officer in the American Embassy in Moscow, to be a keen observer of Russian life and a gifted writer. Fortuitously, he was living in Moscow in 1992 when Russia and the US signed the ``Open Lands'' agreement permitting free travel throughout both countries. Taplin immediately took action. ``Instinctively,'' he writes, ``I knew I had to go beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg, sly old deceivers of travelers past. Was there a truer expression of Russia's past and its future in those forbidden places of the Soviet era?'' He searches for answers in seven locales: Velikiy Ustyug, Vorkuta, Arkhangelsk & Solovki, Kabardino-Balkaria, Tuva, Kamchatka, and Vladivostok. His journeys are full of surprises, revealing a curious mixture of the old and the new, the Soviet-driven and the local. Contrary to general opinion, Vladivostok is not alien or exotic; ``it was a veritable bastion of Russianness.'' It is also, Taplin finds, the very embodiment of the new Russia, its future ``framed, at least for now, by commerce, crime and chaos.'' In Vorkuta, an inhospitable, snow-covered land that is home to isolated villages and the ruins of innumerable Gulag camps, Taplin discovers ghosts of Russia's past. With his malleable prose, he is able to convey the sentiments, personalities, and worlds of both the head organizer of monuments honoring the Gulag's victims and of a woman who defends and honors those who headed the forced-labor brigades that built the region's roads and railroads. Above all, it is Taplin's exquisite literary sensibility that animates this narrative. A description of Vladivostok's airport, applicable universally to former Soviet or East European transport vehicles illustrates his precision and wit: ``The airport terminal . . . was another of Russia's countless dysfunctional edifices, a glass-fronted incubator of grime and body odor.'' A modern classic tale of a foreigner's travels through Russia.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1997
ISBN: 1-883642-01-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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