memoir russia

Atgen PA, Schiffer, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 144 pages illustrated in color and b&w. In 1942, Ed Vebell landed with the US Army in North Africa and was recruited by Stars & Stripes, the US armed forces newspaper, as their official staff artist. Daily, he drew illustrations and reported on the progress of World War II throughout Europe. This book offers a selection of his sketches, drawings, paintings, and photographs from that time, and presents one artist's view of the war from North Africa, through the campaigns in Italy, France, and Germany. After the war, the author spent two weeks with the Russians in Berlin, and was then assigned as the courtroom artist during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Along the way are Ed's reminiscences about such personalities as famed war correspondent and artist Bill Mauldin, singers Josephine Baker and Edith Piaf, Charles de Gaulle, Gen. Teddy Roosevelt Jr., and many others. Ed also reminisces about his two years photographing backstage at the Folies Bergere in Paris, as well as his time as an Olympic fencer. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Bellevue Literary Press, 1st, 2007, Softcover, 236 pages. Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys from Russia to Italy to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In 2008, when Michael McFaul was asked to leave his perch at Stanford and join an unlikely presidential campaign, he had no idea that he would find himself at the beating heart of one of today's most contentious and consequential international relationships As President Barack Obama's adviser on Russian affairs, McFaul helped craft the United States' policy known as "reset" that fostered new and unprecedented collaboration between the two countries And then, as US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, he had a front-row seat when this fleeting, hopeful moment crumbled with Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency This riveting inside account combines history and memoir to tell the full story of US-Russia relations from the fall of the Soviet Union to the new rise of the hostile, paranoid Russian president From the first days of McFaul's ambassadorship, the Kremlin actively sought to discredit and undermine him, hassling him with tactics that included dispatching protesters to his front gates, slandering him on state media, and tightly surveilling him, his staff, and his family. 506 pages, illustrations, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 270 pages. In the early eighties, Jennie Erdal was hired by a flamboyant British publisher she calls Tiger to be his specialist editor for Russian books. By degrees he co-opted her time and loyalty, to the point where she ended up becoming his ghostwriter for a huge nonfiction book on women, two glossy novels, and hundreds of newspaper columns, all published under his own name. She also wrote any number of his love letters. With often ironic directness and quiet comedy, Erdal relates how she became seduced into this peculiar job. On the way she makes fascinating excursions into her own private history, from vivid evocations of her Scottish Presbyterian childhood to moving observations on being an abandoned wife and lone parent to piercing insights into the very nature of literary creation. One of the smartest books about writing in years, Ghosting is a tour de force in which the author renders both Tiger and herself as compelling characters, connected to each other by a strange symbiosis. Their interaction is bizarre and also quite spooky; in the end this is a book about the very nature of identity, literary and otherwise. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 229 pages, b&w illustrations. The searing accounts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginsberg and Varlam Shalamov opened the world's eyes to the terrors of the Soviet Gulag. But not until now has there been a memoir of life inside the camps written from the perspective of an actual employee of the Secret police. In this riveting memoir, superbly translated by Deborah Kaple, Fyodor Mochulsky describes being sent to work as a boss at the forced labor camp of Pechorlag in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle. Only twenty-two years old, he had but a vague idea of the true nature of the Gulag. What he discovered was a world of unimaginable suffering and death, a world where men were starved, beaten, worked to death, or simply executed. Mochulsky details the horrific conditions in the camps and the challenges facing all those involved, from prisoners to guards. He depicts the power struggles within the camps between the secret police and the communist party, between the political prisoners (most of whom had been arrested for the generic crime of "counterrevolutionary activities") and the criminal convicts. And because Mochulsky writes of what he witnessed with the detachment of the engineer that he was, readers can easily understand how a system that destroyed millions of lives could be run by ordinary Soviet citizens who believed they were advancing the cause of socialism. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 294 pages. Emily Johnson has translated and edited a fascinating collection of letters written by Arsenii Formakov, a Latvian Russian poet, novelist, and journalist, during two terms in Soviet labor camps, 1940 to 1947 in Kraslag and 1949 to 1955 in Kamyshlag and Ozerlag. This correspondence, which Formakov mailed home to his family in Riga, provides readers with a firsthand account of the workings of the Soviet penal system and testifies to the hardships of daily life for Latvian prisoners in the Gulag. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Clarion Books, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A young Jewish girl from a middle-class Russian family recalls the events of her childhood, both good and bad, in a small village just before the Revolution of 1917. Though classed as fiction, this reads more like a vivid memoir of the author's childhood. B&w drawings by Gennady Schikarioff.

NY, Simon & Schuster, reprint, 1935, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket. 347 pages. The author was the Moscow correspondent for the New York Times starting in 1920 through the rise of Stalin. A first hand account of Russian history. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 600 pages, in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. In this substantial work, Berberova, a renowned writer who left her homeland along with many compatriots in the wake of the 1917 Revolution, chronicles the travails she encounters in poverty-stricken Russia, poverty-stricken Berlin, and poverty-stricken Paris, where she lived from 1925-1950.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Brothers, 3rd Ed., 1941, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with gilt lettering on the spine, 447 pages. Memoir of life on wartime Europe's frontline by a trailblazing female reporter. Virginia Cowles was just twenty-seven years old when she decided to transform herself from a society columnist into a foreign press correspondent. Looking for Trouble is the story of this evolution, as Cowles reports from both sides of the Spanish Civil War, London on the first day of the Blitz, Nazi-run Munich, and Finlands bitter, bloody resistance to the Russian invasion. Along the way, Cowles also meets Adolf Hitler (an inconspicuous little man), Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill, Martha Gellhorn, and Ernest Hemingway. Her reportage blends sharp political analysis with a gossip columnists chatty approachability and a novelists empathy. Cowles understood in 1937 long before even the average politician that Fascism in Europe was a threat to democracy everywhere. Her insights on extremism are as piercing and relevant today as they were eighty years ago. Clean, bright copy, no dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket with minor wear. Selected and translated by Olga Davydoff Dax. Color illustrations by the author throughout. Mariamna Davydoff, the Russian lady who wrote and illustrated this memoir of her life before the Revolution, was born in 1871 into a large, aristocratic family whose ancestors can he traced back to the eleventh century. After fleeing Russia in 1919, she eventually settled in Brittany with a sister and there reproduced, from memory, albums of detailed text and watcrcolors that had been abandoned in Russia and were later destroyed by the Bolsheviks. The result is a unique, first-hand account of a way of life that we have previously known almost exclusively through the works of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, and a few other writers of the late nineteenth century.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, The Winchell Co., 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 297 pages, b&w illustrations, in a bright dust jacket. Clean. Helene Iswolsky, daughter of a Russian diplomat, grew up in Japan, Denmark, Russia, and France. In 1911, her father became Russian ambassador to France. She returned to Russia for her debut in 1914, to be presented to the Tsarina Alexandra. While there she attended the wedding of Prince Felix Yusupov, who was to murder Rasputin three years later. After the Tsar was overthrown, her father retired to Biarritz and died there in 1919, leaving unpaid debts. The author took up translating and writing. She had a religious awakening and became a Catholic. A sojourn in a Benedictine monastery left her changed, but she decided not to make the cloister her life. The author knew many notable people in the Paris area, especially writers, poets, critics, philosophers of the "new wave," Christian humanists, and Russian emigres. She attended the Sunday afternoon gatherings of Jacques Maritain and Nicholas Berdiaev, and worked on Emmanuel Mounier's journal "Esprit." When the Nazis occupied France, she escaped to America with her mother. Here she founded an ecumenical movement called "The Third Hour" and taught Russian at Fordham University and other schools. She was a close friend of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. Scarce.

Hardcover. NY, Bloomsbury USA, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 509 pages. The relationship between man and horse on the Eurasian steppe gave rise to a succession of rich nomadic cultures. Among them were the Mongols of the thirteenth century - a small tribe, which, under the charismatic leadership of Genghis Khan, created the largest contiguous land empire in history. Inspired by the extraordinary life nomads lead, Tim Cope embarked on a journey that hadn't been successfully completed since those times: to travel on horseback across the entire length of the Eurasian steppe, from Karakorum, the ancient capital of Mongolia, through Kazakhstan, Russia, Crimea and the Ukraine to the Danube River in Hungary. From horse-riding novice to spending months in the saddle, he learnt to fend off wolves and would-be horse-thieves, and grapple with the haunting extremes of the steppe as he crossed sub-zero plateaux, the scorching deserts of Kazakhstan and the high-mountain passes of the Carpathians. As he travelled he formed a close bond with his horses and especially his dog Tigon, and encountered essential hospitality - the linchpin of human survival on the steppe - from those he met along the way. Cope bears witness to how the traditional ways hang in the balance in the post-Soviet world - an era that has brought new-found freedom, but also the perils of corruption and alcoholism, and left a world bereft of both the Communist system upon which it once relied, and the traditional knowledge of the nomadic forefathers.

Hardcover. NY, William Edwin Rudge, 1st, 1930, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth, 46 pages + 51 b&w plates (color frontispiece). Russian artist and diplomatic secretary Paul or Pavel Svinin (1787-1839) toured the northeastern United States in the early 1800s. Here are excerpts of his notes, details about the time and his trip, and 51 BW reproductions of landscapes he rendered along the way. Most of the paintings show scenes from Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Virginia and Maryland. Of interest to both cultural and art historians. With an introduction by R.T.H. Halsey. One of 1000 copies. Ex-lib with stamping, residue to endpapers, gilt lettering on spine faded, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New York, McGraw-Hill, 2nd, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 298 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black and white pictures throughout. ames Oberg (Red Star in Orbit, Mission to Mars, etc.) is a spaceflight engineer at Houston Mission Control; Alcestis Oberg is the author of Spacefarers of the 80s and 90s. Here they offer an engrossing and vivid account of what life is like in an earth-orbiting spacecraft. Because relatively few American space-travelers have published tales of their experiences, the Obergs lean heavily on the diaries and memoirspublished in Russia and little known hereof pioneering Soviet astronauts, notably veterans of long-term Salyut missions like Ryumin and Berezovoy. Here is the human side of life in orbit. Few readers can fail to be grippedand occasionally amusedby revelations of the immediate problems (how astronauts contend with toilets, hygiene, sleeping), their technical perils (e.g., air contamination) and the psychological hazards they face, from crewmate incompatibility to depression and homesickness for Earth. Photos.

Hardcover. NY, Dodd Mead, 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket, 84 pages with index. B&w photos. Ex-lib with minimal signs, light reside to rear endpapers. Beryl Grey was the first Western ballerina to dance in Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre and she tells of her experiences on tour. Clean internally.

Softcover. University Press of Maryland, 2000, Softcover, 306 pages. Memoir (translated from the German by Henny Wenkart) of a Jewish woman in 19th-century Russia, with scholarly introduction and analysis. Pauline Wengeroff's memoir tells what it was like to be a Jewish girl and a Jewish woman in 19th-century Russia, as foundations of faith and tradition eroded around her. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1964, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket. A young English novelist's journey through the Soviet Union in the early sixties (author also wrote "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner', "The General", and others. Name on front fly leaf otherwise clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Mariner Books, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 253 pages, b&w illustrations. From a longtime New Yorker staff cartoonist, an evocative family memoir, a love letter to New York City, and a delightful exploration of the origins of creativity--richly interleaved with the author's witty, beloved cartoons. David Sipress, a dreamer and obsessive drawer living with his Upper West Side family in the age of JFK and Sputnik, goes hazy when it comes to the ceaselessly imparted lessons-on-life from his meticulous father and the angsty expectations of his migraine-prone mother. With wry and brilliantly observed prose, Sipress paints his hapless place in the family, from the time he is tricked by his unreliable older sister into rocketing his pet turtle out his twelfth-floor bedroom window to the moment he walks away from a Harvard PhD program in Russian history to begin his life as a professional cartoonist. Sipress's cartoons appear in the story with spot-on precision, inducing delightful Aha! moments in answer to the perennial question aimed at cartoonists: Where do you get your ideas?