Through a special collaboration with The New York Times, Kingfisher Publications is pleased to present a new way to learn about the events and concepts that define our world. Gripping first-person narratives, written by veteran New York Times journalists, bring history and current events to life for young readers. Full-colour illustrations, photographs and sidebars explain key concepts, and historical articles from the archives of The New York Times place events in the global context. This compelling account carries readers back to Berlin, Germany, in 1991. From the moment his East German assistant bursts into his West Berlin office to tell him that the wall is open, Serge Schmemann is in the thick of things, taking readers along as he witnesses the celebration when the wall is opened and the dramatic changes that follow. From this unique perspective readers learn about the wall, its formation, and what it symbolized to the world, and rejoice along with the residents of Germany when they are finally able to reunite with their brothers across the wall.
Tracing the lives of his Russian forebears, Serge Schmemann, Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times, tells a remarkable story that spans the past two hundred years of Russian history. First, he draws on a family archive rich in pictorial as well as documentary treasure to bring us into the prerevolutionary life of the village of Sergiyevskoye (now called Koltsovo), where the spacious estate of his mother's family was the seat of a manor house as vast and imposing as a grand hotel. In this village, on this estate--ringed with orchards, traversed by endless paths through linden groves, overseen by a towering brick church, and bordered by a sparkling-clear river--we live through the cycle of a year: the springtime mud, summertime card parties, winter nights of music and good talk in a haven safe from the bitter cold and ever-present snow. Family recollections of life a century ago summon up an aura of devotion to tsar and church. The unjust, benevolent, complicated, and ultimately doomed relationship between master and peasants--leading to growing unrest, then to civil war--is subtly captured. Diary entries record the social breakdown step by step: grievances going unresolved, the government foundering, the status quo of rural life overcome by revolutionary fervor. Soon we see the estate brutally collectivized, the church torn apart brick by brick, the manor house burned to the ground. Some of the family are killed in the fighting; others escape into exile; one writes to his kin for the last time from the Gulag. The Soviet era is experienced as a time of privation, suffering, and lost illusions. The Nazi occupation inspires valorous resistance, but at great cost. Eventually all that remains of Sergiyevskoye is an impoverished collective. Without idealizing the tsarist past or wholly damning the regime that followed, Schmemann searches for a lost heritage as he shows how Communism thwarted aspiration and initiative. Above all, however, his book provides for us a deeply felt evocation of the long-ago life of a corner of Russia that is even now movingly beautiful despite the ravages of history and time.
The Russian revolution in 1917 and ensuing civil war caused a massive exodus of upper class, intelligentsia, and military families from Russia. The author's parents were part of that exodus, having stayed on until the very end of the Russian Civil War during which the author's father, Major General Paul Petroff, played an important role in the struggle against the Bolsheviks. They lived in northern China, Shanghai, Japan, and, after years of wandering, arrived in California where they became U.S. citizens and part of the American establishment. As you leaf through the memoir, you will find that the family witnessed the War of the Chinese Warlords, the militarization of Japan where the author's father had a law suit against the government for the recovery of gold bullion deposited by him for safekeeping with the Japanese Military Mission in 1920, the air raids over Tokyo, post-war American politics, the Cold War, the difficult years of the Vietnam War debate, and the Iraq War. Carefully documented from family archival materials, the memoir is a richly woven account of an odyssey that spanned eighty-five years of the author's life, from Harbin, China to the San Francisco Bay Area in California.
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