The Russian command structure was hopelessly confused, their generals old and incompetent, the Tsar cautious and uncertain. The Russian naval defeat at Tsushima was as farcical as it was complete. The Japanese had defeated a big European power, and the lessons for the West were there for all to see, had they cared to do so. From this curious war, so unsafely ignored for the most part by the military minds of the day, Richard Connaughton has woven a fascinating narrative to appeal to readers at all levels.

    Taking the Bucket List of "100 Things to Do Before You Die" as his starting point, Karl combines brilliant stories from his recent adventuresto Alaska, Siberia, and beyond with entertaining, highly-opinionated views on what other people aspire to do with their lives. He tackles such questions as Why on earth would anybody want to run with the bulls in Pamplona, or go "storm chasing" through Tornado Alley? and Why would anyone ever want to have lunch with the Queen, or touch hands with the Pope? A fitting finale to two years of eventful globe-trotting, this companion guide is frank, funny, and strangely inspiring.

    . . My thoughts are filled with frozen rivers that may or may not hold my weight; empty, forgotten valleys haunted by emaciated ghosts; and packs of ravenous, merciless wolves."Having left his job as a high-school geography teacher, Rob Lilwall arrived in Siberia equipped only with a bike and a healthy dose of fear. Cycling Home from Siberia recounts his epic three-and-a-half-year, 30,000-mile journey back to England via the foreboding jungles of Papua New Guinea, an Australian cyclone, and Afghanistan's war-torn Hindu Kush. A gripping story of endurance and adventure, this is also a spiritual journey, providing poignant insight into life on the road in some of the world's toughest corners.

    Clover traces Eurasianism’s origins in the writings of White Russian exiles in 1920s Europe, through Siberia’s Gulag archipelago in the 1950s, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and up to its steady infiltration of the governing elite around Vladimir Putin. This eye-opening analysis pieces together the evidence for Eurasianism’s place at the heart of Kremlin thinking today and explores its impact on recent events, the annexation of Crimea, the rise in Russia of anti-Western paranoia and imperialist rhetoric, as well as Putin’s sometimes perplexing political actions and ambitions.Based on extensive research and dozens of interviews with Putin’s close advisers, this quietly explosive story will be essential reading for anyone concerned with Russia’s past century, and its future.

    Here is China by rail, as seen and heard through the eyes and ears of one of the most intrepid and insightful travel writers of our time.

    To find each work in the anthology, you must go to the "Go To" section of your Nook, and then select "Chapter." It might get a blank screen--if it does, then hit the page forward button and the work will appear. Nikolai Gogol is considered the fathern of modern Russian realism; collected here are his best known works.Works include:Dead SoulsThe Inspector-GeneralTaras Bulba, et. al

    While Vladimir Putin has been president and prime minister of Russia, the Kremlin has deployed the security services to intimidate the political opposition, reassert the power of the state, and carry out assassinations overseas. At the same time, its agents and spies were put beyond public accountability and blessed with the prestige, benefits, and legitimacy lost since the Soviet collapse.The security services have played a central— and often mysterious—role at key turning points in Russia during these tumultuous years: from the Moscow apartment house bombings and theater siege, to the war in Chechnya and the Beslan massacre. The security services are not all-powerful; they have made clumsy and sometimes catastrophic blunders. But what is clear is that after the chaotic 1990s, when they were sidelined, they have made a remarkable return to power, abetted by their most famous alumnus, Putin.

    Richly detailed, immaculately written and full of insights and encounters that bring a complex corner of the world to life' Michael Palin *As serialised on BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week***A FINANCIAL TIMES, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH AND SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR** **ONE OF THE DAILY TELEGRAPH 'S BEST 75 BOOKS OF 2021** A dramatic and ambitious new journey from our greatest travel writer. The Amur River is almost unknown. Yet it is the tenth longest river in the world, rising in the Mongolian mountains and flowing through Siberia to the Pacific to form the tense, highly fortified border between Russia and China. In his eightieth year, Colin Thubron takes a dramatic 3,000-mile long journey from the Amur's secret source to its giant mouth. Harassed by injury and by arrest from the local police, he makes his way along both the Russian and Chinese shores on horseback, on foot, by boat and via the Trans-Siberian Railway, talking to everyone he meets. By the time he reaches the river's desolate end, where Russia's nineteenth-century imperial dream petered out, a whole, pivotal world has come alive. The Amur River is a shining masterpiece by the acknowledged laureate of travel writing, an urgent lesson in history and the culmination of an astonishing career. 'Magnificent... Colin Thubron's observations on the relationship between Russia and China are full of insight, from which the world can benefit as it faces the challenges of the twenty-first century' Jung Chang

     In the depth of winter, Helen Lloyd spent three months cycling solo across one of the most remote, coldest inhabited regions of the planet - Siberia. In temperatures down to -50°C, she battled against the cold, overcoming her fear of wolves and falling through the ice of a frozen lake. Alone in a hibernating land with little to stimulate the senses, the biggest challenges were with her mind as she struggled with the solitude. With flashes of humour and riveting, graphic descriptions that will have you living each moment with her, Helen Lloyd describes the fear, uncertainty and joy of riding through a frozen, icy world. Yet, A Siberian Winter’s Tale is a touching story full of warm-hearted moments that are gifted to Helen by strangers along the Road of Bones.

    The first, Thomas, is an entitled deadbeat, content to pass the rest of his days in Asia skating by on the fact that he's white, while the second, a recent college graduate named Daniel, is an idealist at heart. Over the course of the novel, these two characters fight to establish primacy in Ningyuan, a remote town in the south of Hunan, with one of their more overzealous students, Bella, caught in between. Quincy Carroll's cleverly written debut novel examines what we bring from one country to another.

    Now, as the Party's 18th National Congress oversees the biggest leadership transition in decades, and installs the Bo family's long-time rival Xi Jinping as president, China's rulers are finding it increasingly difficult to keep their poisonous internal divisions behind closed doors.Bo Xilai's breathtaking fall from grace is an extraordinary tale of excess, murder, defection, political purges and ideological clashes going back to Mao himself, as the princeling sons of the revolutionary heroes ascend to control of the Party. China watcher John Garnaut examines how Bo's stellar rise through the ranks troubled his more reformist peers, as he revived anti-'capitalist roader' sentiment, even while his family and associates enjoyed the more open economy's opportunities. Amid fears his imminent elevation to the powerful Standing Committee was leading China towards another destructive Cultural Revolution, have his opponents seized their chance now to destroy Bo and what he stands for? The trigger was his wife Gu Kailai's apparently paranoid murder of an English family friend, which exposed the corruption and brutality of Bo's outwardly successful administration of the massive city of Chongqing. It also led to the one of the highest-level attempted defections in Communist China's history when Bo's right-hand man, police chief Wang Lijun, tried to escape the ruins of his sponsor's reputation.Garnaut explains how this incredible glimpse into the very personal power struggles within the CCP exposes the myth of the unified one-party state. With China approaching super-power status, today's leadership shuffle may set the tone for international relations for decades. Here, Garnaut reveals a particularly Chinese spin on the old adage that the personal is political.

    But the "poison dragons" of misfortune shatter his orderly existence. First, when his village is threatened by a vicious civil war, his family stability is threatened by his second son, a brutal rebel officer. Meanwhile, Yun Cai struggles to free an old friend, P'ei Ti, from a hellish prison—no easy task when P'ei Ti is the rebels' most valuable hostage, and Yun Cai sees himself only as a frightened old man. Throughout his ordeals, Yun Cai draws from the glittering memories of his youth, when he journeyed to the capital to study poetry, joined the upper ranks of the civil service, and secured the friendship of P'ei Ti. Above all, he reflects Su Lin, a great love he won and lost, and for which he paid with his freedom and almost his life. Yun Cai is forced to reconsider all that he is and all that he has ever been in order to summon the wit and courage to confront the warlord General An-Shu and his beautiful but cruel consort, the Lady Ta-Chi.

    Nobody knows the truth. Nine wholesome University students mountaineering in the Urals go missing, and are later uncovered from the snows of a bleak forest’s edge in the Siberian Taiga, in a series of grisly discoveries. Why were the climbers wearing no boots? Why were stout branches of the forest pines singed to a height of thirty feet? What were the mysterious markings in the bark of nearby trees? What was so-called “overwhelming force” that was capable of breaking eight ribs in a single blow without bruises? Why the KGB infiltrated all the search parties and attended the funerals? Why the clothes were tested for radiation? The authoritative book - by international author and investigative journalist: Svetlana Oss (Osadchuk) who has been the leading commentator of this profound mystery since Moscow Times first sponsored her 2007-2008 investigation. The savage events of 1st February 1959, which took nine lives and left a trail of smashed and semi-naked bodies across the slopes of Mount Ortoten, have confounded every credible explanation. Wild and convincing theories abound. All of them are flawed by the facts. Was it sex? Was it hypothermia? Was it robbers? In the first reportage to be published in the English language, The Moscow Times' meticulous coverage presented the existing versions that have proliferated over fifty years, carefully sifting each idea, from mad guesses by superstitious nuts, to reasoned findings of the official investigation. Now Svetlana Oss formulates the true answer. 'Don't go there' explains for the first time how this odyssey by nine seasoned climbers, nine experienced members of the Ekaterinburg University Climbing Society came to end in disaster. New information, new analysis, new brains - the answer will astound you. "I am sure that nothing else that I have written has ever made such a noise in the world, and no wonder. This mystery has an invariable and puzzling quirk: at least one circumstance is inevitably contradicted by some other. Not a single explanation out of the many is able to conquer the riddle – there is always at least one fact that completely ruins whatever theory one prefers. This excites people. It excites me."

    Leanna Adams moved to China in 2006, was nearly robbed, held her co-worker’s hand as she died in a filthy, smoke-filled hospital, bonded with many of her three hundred students and left part of her heart in Wuhu, China. Adams’s contrasting experiences highlight the differences that make the two cultures unique and the similarities that make all people human.

    It's rare to book a plane ticket to visit the lifeless moonscape of Canada's oil sand strip mines, or to seek out the Chinese city of Linfen, legendary as the most polluted in the world. But in Visit Sunny Chernobyl, Andrew Blackwell embraces a different kind of travel, taking a jaunt through the most gruesomely polluted places on Earth.From the hidden bars and convenience stores of a radioactive wilderness to the sacred but reeking waters of India, Visit Sunny Chernobyl fuses immersive first-person reporting with satire and analysis, making the case that it's time to start appreciating our planet as it is—not as we wish it would be. Irreverent and reflective, the book is a love letter to our biosphere's most tainted, most degraded ecosystems, and a measured consideration of what they mean for us. Equal parts travelogue, expose, environmental memoir, and faux guidebook, Blackwell careens through a rogue's gallery of environmental disaster areas in search of the worst the world has to offer—and approaches a deeper understanding of what's really happening to our planet in the process.