Wall to Wall
From Beijing to Berlin by Rail
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of Nothing to Declare—a powerful travel memoir chronicling the author’s 1986 trip through China, Russia, and Eastern Europe and her search for roots, family, and her ancestral home in Ukraine.
Traveling across China and Mongolia to Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express and finally on to Berlin, Morris views the changing landscapes of nations and history. She encounters and converses with a colorful assortment of people from party-liners to dissidents, from ordinary men and women to the Moscow elite.
Her journey, however, occurs against the backdrop of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. On the train and in Russia, Morris hears terrifying, contradictory reports of the condition of the region so near her intended destination outside of Kiev. In midst of this anxious situation, she is forced to make a momentous decision a continent away from family and loved ones, adding a complex inner counterpoint to the public crises unfolding around her.
Bringing her skills with foreign languages and her facility with people to this journey, Mary Morris once again proves that she is, in the words of Times magazine, “a fascinating guide, with an eye for the brutal, the garish, the silly and the bizarre.” Wall to Wall is a powerful travel memoir illuminated by the unique sensibility of one of our finest writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers of Morris's Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Travelling Alone will also be delighted with her new travel memoir, in which the author, with a superb command of language, imaginatively recreates a world few have ventured to. Embarking on a search in 1986 for her Russian ancestors, she found herself in the midst of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and observing the last vestiges of the Cold War. Her details are interesting both on the public scale--such as when she visits the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky--and on the private, as when she meets an unnamed former fighter in the Bolshevik revolution wandering the streets of Leningrad. She describes the histories of each city she visited on her extensive train journey: Moscow, Leningrad, the Forbidden Imperial Citysic of China. With eloquence, Morris characterizes the people she meets, making each real. She has the rare touch of the true travel writer: readers will feel they've walked along the Great Wall of China with her, tasted sand from the Gobi Desert as it flew in a Trans-Siberian Express window, glimpsed the Berlin Wall from the Eastern side. And perhaps most intriguing are the intimations of changes to come--the beginnings of endings that were just around the corner.
