Ryszard Kapuściński was a man of many talents. With respect to his book, "IMPERIUM", I will be focusing on his skills as a travel writer and journalist.

In "IMPERIUM", Kapuściński shares with the reader his perspectives of his lifelong experiences with the Soviet Union (which was the very embodiment of "Imperium"), its culture, and people. This began for Kapuściński, as a 7-year old boy, in his hometown of Pińsk in Eastern Poland in the latter part of 1939, following the Soviet occupation of the eastern half of the country as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact signed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in August of that year. The Soviets did not waste any time in imposing the Russian language and culture upon the Poles through intimidation, terror, deportation, and murder. Kapuściński writes of this experience with a clear-eyed, penetrating poignancy.

Then fast forward 20 years and Kapuściński makes his first visit to the Soviet Union. Though it is then the early post-Stalin era, he shares with the reader the excessive reserve and guardedness of people he encountered wherever he travelled. Foreigners for the average Soviet citizen were viewed with dread, suspicion, and fear. It was deemed wise to avoid them, or should that not prove possible, say little to them.

Kapuściński would return to the Soviet Union in 1967 and again, in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the country became rife with dissent in various regions (who remembers the fight over Nagorno-Karabakh between the Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan?), caught up in an abortive coup by Soviet hardliners in August 1991, and was formally dissolved 4 months later (Christmas Day) by the Soviet Union's last General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Through his travels, Kapuściński shares with the reader his encounters with various people from all walks of life that add lots of spiciness and raw reality to his narrative. For example, Genady Nikolayevich, a 50 year old recently retired coal miner (Kapuściński met him in the late 1980s) who spent most of his life in Vorkuta, a city in Northern Russia around the Arctic Circle which was founded as a work camp (gulag) under Stalin. Subsequently, as the gulags lost their importance following Stalin's death, Vorkuta became a full-fledged mining town. A magnet for anyone in search of a job who was willing to accept the work hazards and the vagaries of the weather.

For anyone anxious to learn something about what the Soviet Union was like on a personal level from Stalin to Gorbachev, as well as varied views on what developed in the Soviet Union between 1985 and its dissolution in 1991, read "IMPERIUM." For me, the book tended to reinforce my views of the Soviet Union/Russia as a rather cold and at times forbidding country. (Aside from St. Petersburg and Odessa, I have no desire - as a tourist - to explore the country further.)

Lucy Knisley, I finished reading your graphic travelogue a short time ago and -   I LOVED IT.  

"AN AGE OF LICENSE: A Travelogue" captures so well and so eloquently the life of a "millenial Woman" in her 20s who is in the process of defining herself and her relationship to her peers, family, colleagues, and the world at large.    Lucy is living in her own apartment (with her cat) in New York, struggling to ekk out a career for herself as an artist when she has an opportunity in September 2011 to visit Europe.   She travels to Norway (where she is able to share her artistic talent with schoolchildren and fellow artists, as well as learn various aspects of Norwegian culture), Sweden (where she hooks up with her Swedish boyfriend Henrik - holder of a PhD in mathematics - whom she had met in New York some time earlier), Berlin (where she and Henrik spent quality time together),  and France (where she hooks up with an old friend, as well as her mother and friends; later, she and Henrik spent several days together in Paris) before returning to New York.         All in all, this is a DELIGHTFUL BOOK with truly impressive drawings.    (I say that as someone who occasionally makes sketches for relaxation.)

By the way, there's a special meaning behind the title "AN AGE OF LICENSE."   But I'll leave it to you, reader of this review, should you opt to read this book, to find out for yourself. 

This book is similar in several respects to its predecessor, "Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York", save for the fact that in the former book, the reader is treated to the perspectives (in essay form) of BOTH men and women writers, actors, and artists who have made New York City their home. Readers who have either - like me - spent time in New York over the years, be it as visitors or residents, OR have come to love the city from afar without having experienced it first-hand, will enjoy this book.

As a confirmed Francophile, I ABSOLUTELY LOVED THIS BOOK, from which I learned so much more about the cultural mores of France.

Wadham herself had been married to a Frenchman for close to 20 years, with whom she had 4 children (all of them educated in the French educational system), and, though divorced, continues to live and work in France. While shedding insight into French attitudes toward religion, politics, education, race, relationships, history (France continues to be very conflicted about its wartime behavior under the German Occupation), the French language, the law, and the nation itself, she intersperses the book with some of her own experiences with her French family and friends, which also gives the book the feel of a diary and an anthropological case study. Further, Wadham's contrasts of French attitudes with comparable Anglo Saxon cultural norms and practices (as exemplified by Britain and America) I found both startling and intriguing.

(I have twice visited Paris, and though my French is very far from fluent, I had not met with any outward shows of derision or contempt from any Parisians I encountered during my daily pereginations in the city.)


For the reader of this review, I'd like to cite 2 passages from the book, which may give you food for thought ---


"Television is [for the British] ... a medium naturally given to the worship of reality. In line with our love of reality and our taste for the comic over the tragic, the British are excellent watchers and makers of television. The French, on the other hand, with their love of grand ideas and their contempt for reality, make execrable television. Hours of French airtime are devoted to the spectacle of people (anybody will do) sitting around discussing ideas. There is none of the British mistrust of 'talking heads'. Talking heads are seen as a good thing in France, and the louder they talk the better."

"It is strange to me to watch my own children struggling, for the first time, with the very facets of their own culture that I found so infuriating when I first arrived twenty-three years ago. While they were growing up, I was blind to my own influence upon them. They seemed to me so wonderfully French that I would never have guessed that their Englishness would one day come and bite me on the bottom. Now that they're getting ready to leave for England, I find myself buried so deeply in this culture that I doubt I can ever escape it. France has swallowed me up, but not my children.

"My relationship with France began with my relationship with Laurent. When the marriage ended, I assumed that my link to France would lessen in intensity. I was no longer speaking French all hours of the day, dreaming in French, arguing in French, loving in French. I thought I was no longer bound to this place. My children were grown up, so I could now choose: England or France. And then I discovered that I didn't want to leave. I know France now and in knowing her, I love her. Like the long-suffering spouse who realises, after all those years, that in spite of everything, there is no one in the world she would rather be with. I adore and despise this country in equal measure."