i read two excerpts from this book in the New Yorker Magazine a summer or two ago and couldn’t tear myself away. It’s such an adventure. If you’ve ever read one of the great Russian novels or studied world history at all you already have an historical vision filed away in your head and this book brings it all back, richly. The spirit in which Frazier traveled to research this book and because he’s written it so well you feel like a fly on his shoulder throughout the journey. i’m so happy the book is finally published, i’ve been waiting a long time for it. Highly recommended!
Rating: 5 / 5

I will not try to add much to the other 5-star reviews of “Travels in Siberia” except to say that the superlatives being used here are totally justified. As a review in the San Francisco chronicle said, “‘Travels in Siberia’ is a masterpiece of nonfiction writing – tragic, bizarre and funny. Once again, the inimitable Frazier has managed to create a genre of his very own.” This review is spot on. Readers should read this book and savor every word. It truly is one of the most beautifully written books I have ever encountered–one for the ages.

BUT, I implore people like Mr. Piro to stop giving 1-Star reviews to books because you don’t like Amazon’s pricing policy! Don’t you realize that you are supposed to be reviewing the content of the book? If you are upset with Amazon, why are you taking it out on an author who has nothing at all to do with how Amazon sets its prices? Your anger is totally misdirected. If you are upset with Amazon, CALL them up or WRITE them and complain. To give this great book a 1-star review because you’re upset with Amazon is the height of stupidity.
Rating: 5 / 5

Ian Frazier is a witty but sober writer who visits gritty, sandy, vast landscapes and brings back stories to enchant those of us who enjoy his take on places we have already seen, or who long for a roadmap to places we can never go. I read Frazier’s GREAT PLAINS with a calm sense of intimacy, having been there and wanting to know more — the history, the oddities and the trivia that make returning a pleasure. I know I will never make it to Siberia, but my curiosity about the country has been largely satisfied by reading Frazier’s guide to the huge loneliness and bizarre, almost cruel ironies of the place most often associated in our minds with punishment, slavery and agonizing icy death.

Staged over several trips, assisted by Russian friends he met on other travels, this book is big. One feels it has to be to hope to encompass the subject matter, a splotch on the map whose area comprises one-twelfth of the earth’s landmass, yet is hostile, under-populated and fearsome, its very name evoking images of horror because of the thousands of human beings who have been exiled there over the past few hundred years. For much of TRAVELS IN SIBERIA, Frazier is motoring in a step van with friends and guides, camping out every night because there were pretty much no towns to stay in, and no restrictions on setting up camp anywhere in the empty countryside. Only the bugs in their millions came out to greet them as they passed through Rasputin’s hometown and the site of the ignominious slaughter and hidden burial ground of the last Tsar.

Frazier reminds us that though Siberia has always been to Americans a land of mystery, as remote and foreboding as a dark star, America has never been that far away from Siberia, both geographically (Sarah Palin can probably see Siberia from her front porch!) and, as it turns out, commercially. Stuff, such as earthmoving equipment and barbed wire (to build and maintain the terrifying, near genocidal political prisons always hovering in the background of the Cold War headlines), had to have been imported from the USA. Frazier points that “American firms sold handcuffs to the NKVD in the Far East.” How strange and ironic is that?

Every great journey has its minor distractions, and side trips that become central to the completion. One thing that happened while Frazier was on one leg of his journey in the “great plains” of northern Asia was September 11, 2001. He learned about it while fishing around an area called “Merry Cliff.” Determined as he was to fly back to the US at once, this was not exactly an easy plan to carry out. He was given a consolation salmon by the locals, and marked time making sketches and writing about fishing. Finally he was able to fly out, from Vladivostok to Seoul to Anchorage to JFK; to get out of Vladivostok, he had to bribe the Russian airport official who swore she had never heard of his reservation until she saw his five-dollar bill.

Frazier opines that “somehow Stalin gets a pass” for the death camps of Siberia, while Hitler’s responsibility for the Holocaust is infamous, and he has been “declared horrible officially.” Despite the purges and forced starvation of Stalin’s many enemies, and the fact that under Communist rule of the USSR some 60 million people “died by unnatural causes,” Americans have withheld any final absolute condemnation of the mastermind of Siberian exile and torture.

Siberia and its people, observed by Frazier, are a dizzying mix of stoic acceptance of what life throws at you, tenacious religious faith bordering on idolatry, readiness to join in the game of capitalist corruption with a right good will, and an unnerving, hopeful glee for life, sardonic though it may be. To call it a “disaster” as Frazier does is hardly an exaggeration. Parts of Siberia are melting precipitously with the permafrost, revealing the mummies of mammoths and who knows what else. The people who carefully moved the cosmetically altered corpse of Lenin all over the republic, including a brief holiday in Siberia, and who watched multitudes of human corpses rise up out of the Siberian tundra with every spring thaw, are no strangers to the appearance of death. The question is, do they recognize and revere life? Frazier leaves that one unanswered.

— Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott

Rating: 5 / 5