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The Border: A Journey Around Russia Through North Korea, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, … Finland, Norway, and the Northeast Passage
Top of the pile
86
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
92/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
Erika Fatland, Kari Dickson
Publisher:
Pegasus Books
Date:
February 2, 2021
The acclaimed author of Sovietistan travels along the seemingly endless Russian border and reveals the deep and pervasive influence it has had across half the globe.
What The Reviewers Say
Over the course of eight months in 2017, she traveled to all these places, seeking answers to one unspoken question: What is life like when you live next door to an aggressive bully?.
Officially, the book is a travelogue-cum-cultural history, tracing the author’s journey across the 14 countries bordering the world’s largest country. (Of them, only the author’s native Norway was never occupied by Russia.) In practice, however, the book is a hauntingly lyrical meditation to the contingencies of history, the sheer arbitrariness of dividing lines and border posts, of namesakes forgotten and remembered, of successful and unsuccessful wars.
In this ambitious travelogue, journalist Fatland documents her multiyear odyssey along Russia’s 60,932-kilometer-long border with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea.
