The Road of Bones
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Road of Bones: A Journey to the Dark Heart of Russia for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"The Road of Bones is informative, poetic and eerily beautiful...[Poolman's] words weave a haunting spell" --Metro 4 stars, February 16, 2011
Review
'If you really want to get to know a place, ask a local - and in Red Square, Moscow, that means taking tips from Uncle Joe' My Travels, Guardian 12/2 'The Road of Bones is informative, poetic and eerily beautiful; a dreamlike, slightly feverish journey through the road's history and reality (whatever that 'reality' may be; officially the gulags are gone but many of the Russians the author meets seem to believe otherwise)... his words weave a haunting spell' Metro, 4 stars 16/2 Praise for Jeremy Poolman 'A writer of considerable verbal dexterity and razor-sharp insight' Washington Post Book World 'Poolman's writing has sheer chutzpah' Sunday Herald 'Poolman keeps his reader on the rack with taut, paranoid sentences' Daily Telegraph 'a moving personal homage' Waterstones Books Quarterly
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I've been reading a few heavyweight books recently on the Gulags and the Soviet Union, so this offered a new angle in so far as it was not specifically historical, rather it was a modern day trek along a wretched road which had been well trodden and traversed by millions of the 20th Century's most harshly damned lives.
It moves along briskly, and the many different towns and people all came and went without making any great impression on me. Yes, the residents occasionally had something to either tell (or not tell, as was often the case) but I would have liked more of a friendly approach (Bill Bryson or Michael Palin do this well) in terms of not only getting these people to talk, but also in conjuring up their lives and their part of the world in my mind. Instead, one grey place quickly became the next, as did the grey people. I don't think it was helped by the author being brusque and defensive with them, and his being unable to speak Russian didn't help matters at all.
This is a real journey, so I would have liked to have seen some photographs taken by the author on his long trek. I would have felt far more connected that way, because there's only so much literary description you can give to such a continually grim environment. Pictures would have made a huge difference, especially at the end when he reaches an orphanage in the middle of nowhere. That is a place which would leave its mark on any reader, and some imagery would have been very helpful.
A few maps would have been welcome as well, because I would have liked a grasp of where he was as the pages flicked by. One Russian name and grim fact is much like the previous one, or the next one, or the one after that... and so on, therefore photos and maps would have made the biggest difference to this entire book. It wasn't for lack of space, because not only is the text quite large, but there are blank pages all over the place. They appear at the end of some chapters (chapters which, incidentally, have no numbers or titles) whereas other chapters lead straight on. I don't know why that is, but if it might be to do with the number of pages needed for the printing or whatever, but if so why not use them constructively and throw in a few photos?
Ultimately I felt it all ended too quickly, and a truly engrossing journey hadn't been given the space it deserved. I have tremendous respect for the author's commitment to the memory of his friend Max, and also the way he similarly upheld the memory of the millions of innocent men, women and children who travelled that road by order of Lenin and Stalin (not forgetting Khrushchev and Brezhnev, to a lesser extent). I also admire the determination the author showed to take on, and complete, his trek across a freezing land which is as inhospitable and unpleasant as it gets. I just hope that one day a bigger, image-laden version of this book, I'd say 200 pages longer, might emerge. Then sections which currently appear as just a few lines might be granted enough pages and thus convey a great deal more than is on show in this edition. For example, the set-up for the whole journey - I'd have liked to have known more about Max (the cause of this trip) because that would have been a great help to have understood his background, his connections to the author and to the Gulags, his philosophies, and thus the author's motivation.
It moves along briskly, and the many different towns and people all came and went without making any great impression on me. Yes, the residents occasionally had something to either tell (or not tell, as was often the case) but I would have liked more of a friendly approach (Bill Bryson or Michael Palin do this well) in terms of not only getting these people to talk, but also in conjuring up their lives and their part of the world in my mind. Instead, one grey place quickly became the next, as did the grey people. I don't think it was helped by the author being brusque and defensive with them, and his being unable to speak Russian didn't help matters at all.
This is a real journey, so I would have liked to have seen some photographs taken by the author on his long trek. I would have felt far more connected that way, because there's only so much literary description you can give to such a continually grim environment. Pictures would have made a huge difference, especially at the end when he reaches an orphanage in the middle of nowhere. That is a place which would leave its mark on any reader, and some imagery would have been very helpful.
A few maps would have been welcome as well, because I would have liked a grasp of where he was as the pages flicked by. One Russian name and grim fact is much like the previous one, or the next one, or the one after that... and so on, therefore photos and maps would have made the biggest difference to this entire book. It wasn't for lack of space, because not only is the text quite large, but there are blank pages all over the place. They appear at the end of some chapters (chapters which, incidentally, have no numbers or titles) whereas other chapters lead straight on. I don't know why that is, but if it might be to do with the number of pages needed for the printing or whatever, but if so why not use them constructively and throw in a few photos?
Ultimately I felt it all ended too quickly, and a truly engrossing journey hadn't been given the space it deserved. I have tremendous respect for the author's commitment to the memory of his friend Max, and also the way he similarly upheld the memory of the millions of innocent men, women and children who travelled that road by order of Lenin and Stalin (not forgetting Khrushchev and Brezhnev, to a lesser extent). I also admire the determination the author showed to take on, and complete, his trek across a freezing land which is as inhospitable and unpleasant as it gets. I just hope that one day a bigger, image-laden version of this book, I'd say 200 pages longer, might emerge. Then sections which currently appear as just a few lines might be granted enough pages and thus convey a great deal more than is on show in this edition. For example, the set-up for the whole journey - I'd have liked to have known more about Max (the cause of this trip) because that would have been a great help to have understood his background, his connections to the author and to the Gulags, his philosophies, and thus the author's motivation.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
mazzie sydney australia
3 Aug 2011
Format:Kindle Edition
wonderful evocative sad tragic journey ! I could not put this book down and recommend it to any one looking for insight into barbarity and the soul of mankind
Was this review helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
