Pravda Ha Ha

Starred review from September 16, 2019
The hopes of 1989 have dimmed into illiberal authoritarianism according to this tragicomic view of post-communist Europe. British travel writer Maclean (Stalin’s Nose) reprises a journey he made after the fall of the Berlin Wall into the democratic ferment of Eastern Europe, a region now mired in klepto-capitalism, quasi-dictatorship, and ethnonationalism. He spends much time in a semibarbarous Russia, firing assault rifles and eating a hallucinogenic mushroom species—dubbed “Putin’s Pecker”—with an oligarch; viewing a tank parade; and visiting the Internet Research Agency, headquarters of Russian social media subversion. Other stops include Estonia, where the population eternally prepares for guerilla war against Russian invaders; Hungary, where homeless vagrants spout diatribes against an imaginary migrant menace; and Poland, where sleek media professionals do the same. Threaded throughout is the author’s engagement with a Nigerian migrant trying to get from Moscow, where nuns allegedly amputated his toe, to England. Maclean combines vivid reportage (“Moscow unfolded like a flipbook... newly gilded onion domes, low-slung Maseratis and Little Potato fast-food stalls.... Fuming policemen swaggered across the broad boulevards, their truncheons knocking against their jackboots”) with unabashed soapboxing (“I yelled at the drunks... saying that lies had to be exposed and evil held at bay”). The result is an engrossing travelogue that’s both trenchantly observant and deeply felt.

October 15, 2019
The acclaimed British travel writer and historian retraces his trip after the fall of the Berlin Wall to explore what happened to the hopes and promises of 1989. This time, MacLean (In North Korea: Lives and Lies in the State of Truth, 2017, etc.) traveled in the reverse direction, from Moscow to Berlin. His six-month journey included Estonia, Ukraine, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, and little-known Transnistria. As the author relates, the promise of democracy lasted only so long. Drawn by the newly dynamic economies, the money- and power-hungry moved in. The rise of nationalism--which built on Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt's teachings that Germans' utopia was stolen by existentially different and alien opponents--has created enmity and violence toward migrants, the poor, and other marginalized groups. Having used his characteristic talent of drawing insight from those he meets, the author offers fascinating profiles throughout: the Russian chicken czar who shared his rare hallucinogenic truffle, one of the many oligarchs enjoying the new wealth, at least for the moment; and a Nigerian refugee who told the harrowing story of his unflinching determination to get to London. One of MacLean's contacts described how Russian tacticians were able, by 2007, to shut down Estonian cyberspace and then take over Georgian government websites and interfere in Crimea, Ukraine, France, and the U.S. Not just a travelogue, this is a consistently engaging yet fearsome book that effectively traces the rise of national identity as a myth that paves the way for racism, xenophobia, and even genocide. "Thirty years ago," writes MacLean, "Europe became whole again....In Berlin, Prague and Moscow I'd danced with so many others on the grave of dictatorships....I convinced myself that our generation was an exception in history, that we'd learned to live by different rules, that we were bound together by freedom....I've remade this journey--backwards--to try to understand how it went wrong." Another engrossing book from an author who is much more than just a travel writer.

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December 1, 2019

In this timely look at the former Soviet Union, British travel writer Maclean (Stalin's Nose), goes back to Russia and areas of the former U.S.S.R. to discover what went wrong after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. He describes the initial euphoria at newfound freedoms, the hard times afterward as the "USSR imploded," and the lack of freedom under the current leadership of Putin. Maclean brings the current reality of Russians to light with vivid descriptions of visits with various characters and their views on life and the future, which at first seem surprising, but quickly fall into a recognizable pattern. From a Russian oligarch with teeth like "broken rocks" who made a fortune selling mushrooms and a young Nigerian immigrant frantically searching for a way to freedom, to a quick look at the chilling Internet Research Agency and the havoc it has wreaked, the author writes with heart and draws in readers with his captivating experiences. VERDICT Fans of travelogs, history buffs, and those with an interest in Russia and the former U.S.S.R. will thoroughly enjoy.--Holly Hebert, Middle Tennessee State Univ., Murfreesboro

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2019
A trek through Eastern Europe exposes a region in retrograde, as fragile postwar optimism gives way to predatory capitalism and the reanimation of age-old prejudices. The somewhat morbid fun starts in the woods west of Moscow, where Russia's chicken tsar leads a heavily armed entourage on a hunt for Putin's Pecker, a rare (and supposedly psychoactive) truffle. In St. Petersburg we meet a morally flexible election hacker; in Solovki ( Russia's Stonehenge, Lourdes and Auschwitz ), an aircraft hangar-turned-art gallery rots away, perhaps defeated by people's unwillingness to face the past. Fear and denial define the sliver-thin republic of Transnistria, Poland and Hungary grapple with an anti-democratic backlash, and Ukraine?polluted, freezing, and, perhaps, ungovernable?feels like a bad dream. But the saddest story may be that of Sami, a West African refugee maimed by Russian nuns, who struggles to escape to anywhere he is welcome. For MacLean, this is a personal journey, retracing in reverse the route of his 1992 debut, Stalin's Nose, which celebrated the connectedness and quirkiness of the thawing Cold War borderlands. And if the years have not diminished the author's delightful ability to sniff out the surreal, the increasingly bleak situation at the end of Europe has him very worried.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)