Rory MacLean’s Pravda Ha Ha is...a triumph, made all the more commendable by its inherent challenges.

... gripping.

MacLean’s book is immensely readable. The history and politics of Eastern Europe are tackled here with humor and dry wit. MacLean is not writing a textbook but rather a series of richly detailed anecdotes about his experiences. This is perhaps the major fault of the book: MacLean assumes that his experiences of Eastern Europe are universal. His experience of Russia, for example, as solely corrupt and hopeless may not necessarily be fair to the people who actually make their lives there. However, this might also be a lesson of the book. Memory, MacLean suggests, goes a terribly long way to shape the way we view the world around us. In other words, memory becomes narrative, and narrative becomes the deciding factor in who writes history, and how. Pravda Ha Ha, in this way, is less a history of Eastern Europe than it is a history of Rory MacLean, and there are certainly worse histories you could read..

Readable and often grimly entertaining, Pravda Ha Ha demonstrates that Mr. MacLean has not lost his eye for absurdity...or a revealing detail. Yet Pravda Ha Ha has less of the subtlety that marked Mr. MacLean’s long-ago debut, a shortfall that extends into occasionally clumsy prose.

MacLean is a fine sleuth.

MacLean...is an unabashed anecdote hunter—Alice in dezinformatsiya wonderland. What he fails to demonstrate in investigative tenacity, he makes up for in hyper-coloured absurdity and gleeful caricature.

Pravda Ha Ha is perhaps the wildest travel book I’ve come across.

In this timely look at the former Soviet Union, British travel writer Maclean... brings the current reality of Russians to light with vivid descriptions of visits with various characters and their views on life and the future, which at first seem surprising, but quickly fall into a recognizable pattern.

Having used his characteristic talent of drawing insight from those he meets, the author offers fascinating profiles throughout.

... an engrossing travelogue that’s both trenchantly observant and deeply felt..