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Product Description
Every year 1000's compete to win the RGS/BBC Journey of a lifetime award and fulfil their travel dreams. Andy Home's dream would be most people's nightmare. Andy went to Siberia, to the Russian industrial mining city of Norilsk where temperatures drop to minus 50, half the year is spent in perpetual darkness and the pollution has destroyed all natural life. Once a prison camp, then a secret Soviet military city, Norilsk teetered on the edge of financial and social meltdown in the early 1990's. Now, it is owned by one of Russia's new breed of all-powerful oligarchs and is the biggest single source of the metals we all use in our day to day lives. Andy's quest was to meet these former Soviet shock workers and ask them what life is like in 21st Century Russia. Is it worse? Is it better? And what do the 200,000 people in Norilsk dream of? This work presents a fast paced, humorous and insightlful account of an extraordinary journey of a lifetime.
About the Author
Andy Home is 42, recently married and lives in north London. A Cambridge graduate in modern languages he has spent much of his career writing for professionals in the industrial commodity markets. He was a senior manager at an international news agency before taking a year out and setting up his own market analysis company, Metals Insider, in 2003. He has travelled extensively, hitch-hiking across the United States, crossing Turkey by bus and India by everything from camel to speedboat. Business travel has taken him to the somewhat more prosaic Walsall, Birmingham and Detroit. This was his first journey to Russia. As part of the Journey of a Lifetime Award, Andy made a thirty-minute documentary on Radio 4 and gave a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society. He's still working on realising his next dream journey.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
No Palin-esque travelogue,
By James v B (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Siberian Dreams: Winner RGS/BBC Journey of a Lifetime Award (Paperback)
Siberian Dreams is a very entertaining account by journalist Andy Home of his journey to Norilsk, one of the world's most polluted cities, located inside the Arctic Circle in Russia. Home, together with a Russian colleague, won a competition to make a radio programme for BBC Radio 4 and the book documents their trip and the making of the programme.Norilsk is today still a grim, closed Soviet-style city, controlled by one of the world's most important metals-producing companies, where the snow is black and the air is thick with sulphur and worse. After years writing about the company, Home visited the place to see for himself what it's like and more interestingly, what life is like for the 200,000 people who live there. Transcripts describe the author's first impressions of toxic waste running down the streets, of a rusting cityscape and a surrounding landscape where not a scrap of green is visible. But this changes when he gets used to the town's outside/inside world, where nothing is quite what it first seems and neither are the people. He interviews residents of Norilsk and employees of the company about how they ended up living there and what keeps them there. The book also gives readers a light insight into Russia's post-Stalin industrial history and how Norilsk's oligarchs are thriving while others have fallen foul of Putin's Kremlin. The constant presence of the company's `public relations' department suggests that Russia's penchant for espionage and mistrust of the West has gone undiminished. This is no Michael Palin travelogue and the Arctic scenery is grim, but the colour Home finds behind padded doors and the humour he sees in its polluted environment and sub-zero climate is very enjoyable. His experiences in Norilsk's hotel, bars and restaurants are very funny, as are accounts of his own vodka-fuelled drunkenness in strange places with very strange people.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Siberian Platinum,
By
This review is from: Siberian Dreams: Winner RGS/BBC Journey of a Lifetime Award (Paperback)
This is not your typical travel book. The focus of it's pages mainly concern the effects the mining for precious metals has on the city of Norilsk the surrounding area and it's people. The theme running through the book is that of the day to day running of Norilsk Nickel and of the emergence of Russia from it's cold war years, through the turbulent early nineties and now into 2006 and beyond. The author does a grand job of describing the bleakness of the Siberian tundra and that of the environmental effects the mining has had on the area. The book is fast paced and is never dull and you will learn an awful lot about Norilsk and the local area. There is also a mini encyclopedia at the back of the book about the different metals mined from this area, which maybe useful reference for some.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Definately not a pleasure cruise,
By RG (Barnsley) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Siberian Dreams: Winner RGS/BBC Journey of a Lifetime Award (Paperback)
An enjoyable book that captured a picture in the minds eye of a rusting hell hole, secret police and the merciless artic tundra. I would love to have seen a few pictures in the book to supplement the narrative but that is my only quibble and a minor one at that. really makes you wonder how people live in such a place without going stark raving bonkers?...maybe the vodka makes it just about tolerable. Well worth a read.
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