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 enlarge | Author: Jeffrey Tayler
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 118216
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.4 x 0.6
ISBN: 0618919848
Dewey Decimal Number: 914
EAN: 9780618919840
ASIN: 0618919848
Publication Date: September 13, 2007
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| Customer Reviews:
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Summer rafting in an extreme place with an uncertain future September 21, 2006
19 out of 20 found this review helpful
Burdened with a brutal history of Cossack conquest, labor camps, gulags, displaced people and rapacious resource plundering, and all but abandoned by the state that exploited it, Siberia is the perfect choice for a certain sort of travel writer to go and reflect on the state of the world.
Jeffrey Tayler ("Siberian Dawn," "Angry Wind"), a linguist who speaks Russian, Arabic, French, Greek and several other languages, writes about remote and difficult places - the Sahara, the Congo, Siberia. His previous trip to Siberia was in winter, when he traveled on the frozen Lena River by truck.
This time he goes in summer by inflatable raft down the same river, retracing some 2,400 miles of Cossack exploration, from Lake Baikal to Tiksi on the Arctic Ocean, 450 miles above the Arctic Circle. Tiksi is the sort of place where the deluxe hotel suite does not come with hot water in the "warm" months, the months of "rain and snow, not just snow."
The trip grew out of a desire to clear his head of city clamor and explore the lives of real Russians - the impoverished rural masses. Having lived in Russia for 11 years, made a life and married, Tayler, an American, finds himself despairing of the place. The collapse of communism seems only to have opened the doors to corruption and chaos. "I was seized by a desire to find out what had gone wrong? Had I really devoted my life to a doomed land?"
His guide is the misanthropic Vadim, a Muscovite and Afghan War veteran who drives a truck and spends every summer in the North. He would prefer his beloved Siberia without people and his disdain for Tayler's insistence on stopping at each down-at-heels village to talk with the inhabitants only grows with time. His enthusiasm for the land is vocal and passionate and Tayler's restraint baffles him. Their personalities chafe, but Tayler grows to appreciate his expertise - from his boat handling skills to his precision in setting up the daily camp.
The trip itself is as grim as it is adventurous. The indigenous Yakuts and Evenks, forced by the Soviets to abandon nomadic lives for villages, factories and government subsidies, now find themselves abandoned, the old ways forgotten. The Russians include descendants of prisoners - criminals, dissidents and intellectuals - as well as exiled Baptists and Germans. Others came for the high pay and benefits offered by the Soviet government to harvest the land's rich resources. And now the factories are closed and the benefits long gone.
People, even descendants of those banished by Stalin, yearn for the security and order of a strong central authority. Tayler despairs at their nostalgia for Soviet rule and their support for Putin's strong-arm tactics. Alcohol is a ubiquitous plague.
Even the weather seems to signal collapse. As the raft heads north storm follows storm, lashing the travelers with frigid rain and gale-force winds, when the season calls for balmy temperatures and alpine tundra blooms. Climate change, the inhabitants comment, has deprived them of summer.
Tayler writes with an eye for detail and a certain reserve. Though open to everyone he meets, he is also wary and not easily bamboozled. While Vadim exults over the view at every bend in the river, Tayler's enthusiasm is tempered by the (literally) choking clouds of bugs and a certain impatience with Vadim's insular chauvinism. This is a thoughtful, sympathetic, often melancholy portrait of an extreme place with an extreme history and an uncertain future.
-- Portsmouth Herald
 A PHOTO IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS August 28, 2006
6 out of 47 found this review helpful
This book is really two stories. One is about an adventurous trip down a Siberian river in a small boat. The other is about the frontierspeople who inhabit its shores.
There are only two photographs. One, on the jacket, is a studio portrait of the author. The other, on the cover, is of a man in a boat, purporting to be the author but bearing no resemblance to the other photo. In fact, there is no hard evidence that the author even made the trip. Aside from the two photos, the only other graphic is a one-page, black and white map, amateurishly sketched by Chazaud.
Unless you are visually challenged, the best way to enjoy armchair adventures is to watch them on television. Or save your money for something like a subscription to National Geographic.
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