This was an excellent study of a complex topic. Professor Shimko should be congratulated for his thoughtful analysis of this issue. Highly recommended.

Filled from cover to cover with black-and-white photographs, Images Of Kursk: History's Greatest Tank Battle, July 1943 by Nik Cornish is a gritty, compellingly accurate, point-by-point dissection of the pivotal tank battle of World War II, between Russian and German forces from beginning to end. Vivid details, sobering statistics, and personal eye-witness testimonies enhance the text of this unforgettable and very highly recommended study of a crucial piece of World War II military history.

Good book. The reader sees the world through the eyes of the character. It will give a perspective of where the former immigrants that make up America are coming from. It shows how much love these newly arrived folks have for their new country. Was the main character fighting for America or was he still at war with the Russian and Gerrmans that left his native country all but uninhabitable, or was it a mixture of the two. I'm looking forward to his rumored sequels about his experiences and the political climate he survived.

This is a masterful book that combines intellectual history and geography in a way that has not been done before, shining a new light on the issues of Russian identity and the interrelationship between exploration, conquest and nationalism.

At the center of Bassin's work is the region around the Amur River. The Amur, closed to the Russians since the late seventeenth century, attracted intense interest in Russia throughout the later part of Nicholas I's regime, but especially in the aftermath of the country's defeat in the Crimean War. Wild, unsubstantiated exaggerations fueled this "Amur euphoria." The conquest and settlement of the Amur came to be seen as a national imperative, compensation for humiliation elsewhere. Amidst this frenzy, eager promoters who had never set their eyes on the Amur tagged the river as the "Siberian Mississippi," hoping that it would do for Siberia--and indeed for Russia as a whole--what the Mississippi did for the United States. They attached great hopes to this river. The waters of the Amur were to cleanse Russia's wounds, and redeem her in her newly-asserted eastern destiny. Yet the euphoria proved fleeting. Not long after the Russians reconquered the Amur, the realities confounded the hopes.

Although the Amur region is at the center of Bassin's book, its real subject, as the title indicates, are the "visions" of that object-region. These visions are the reflections of the visionaries, and become in certain ways "self-portraits" (p. 274), to use the author's own apt metaphor that indicates a methodological affinity to other recent works, most notably Yuri Slezkine's _Arctic Mirrors_. Whether as "mirrors" or as "self-portraits," these visions reveal far more about the visionaries than the envisioned. The "Amur euphoria" of the 1850s reflected the desperate desire of the Russian visionaries, in the wake of the Crimean War debacle, to both turn away from a Europe that "spurned" them and wounded their national pride and, at the same time, reaffirm their own Europeanness as effective "civilizers" of the east. These are complicated, sometimes conflicting visions of an "imagined" region, but Bassin skillfully steers us through them one at a time with the exuberance of a Huck Finn sailing on his raft down the Mississippi. In the process, he produces a work that will be indispensable for anyone grappling with the hisitorical issues of Russia's imperial visions.

Samuel Walker has created a wonderful book on the history of the ACLU, In Defense of American Liberties, that is a must for anyone concerned with the history of freedom of speech and the men and women who fought for them in America. This book shows the development from fringe to mainstream of the ideas shared by a group of people in the 1910's. The book is by no means hagiography as the darker moments of the ACLU are presented with clarity, such as their hounding and forcing out of Communist members simply for their beliefs. It is both very informative and truly entertaining. A wonderful book that demonstrates the importance the ACLU has had in the twentienth century shaping political ideas.

If you are begining to learn about the labor world, this is the perfect book to start out with. It gives you a broad overview of many topics and ways of labor unions.

Irina Ratushinskaya is a Russian poet/writer who became a political prisoner in the Soviet Union due to her dissident activities. I happened to come across another book of hers, "A Tale of Three Heads" and fell in love with it, and so I was interested in finding something else by her to read.

Whereas the book "Grey is the Color of Hope" is about her experiences in prison, most of this book is about Ratushinskaya's life before she was arrested. She talks about growing up in Odessa, and about the life of her husband when he was younger, how he worked to overcome difficulties walking, and how he loved making fire. Although religion, being forbidden under the Soviets, did not play a large part in their lives growing up, instilled in both of them was a thirst for the truth, and a sense of decency and justice -- things which, as they got older, they saw the Soviets try to do away with as well. (Of course Lenin was a genius in physics!)

For these reasons, they had to decide to play along with this system or to try to resist it - they chose to resist. Coming together with others of like mind, they hoped to help circulate forbidden texts, such as those of Solzhenytsin, to do anything to loosen the grip the Soviets had on the minds of the people. Ratushinskaya is a poet herself, and her poetry was also circulated; one of the reasons that she served much more time in prison as her husband.

She did survive, and after her release she and her husband were forced to flee to England.

This book, however, is a well-written chronicle of what will bring a person (or in this case two) to try to fight against a tyranny that they have almost no hope of toppling, and yet they struggle on anyway.

This book is the author's original translation of the Russian publication "V nebe frontovom". It contains Soviet war-memoirs of the three female air-regiments formed by Marina Raskova. Although this book has been recently updated and re-released in improved form as "Women in Air War -- The Eastern Front of World War ll", I still appreciate this spiral-bound collection of memoirs. A few of them, particularly the veterans' accounts of their post-War, peace-time service, have not been included in the newer volume. And Zhenya Rudneva's journal (poka stuchit serdtse), "As Long As The Heart Beats", is found here in greater detail. Moreover, on the cover of this book, I obtained the autograph of a retired Russian MiG instructor who had personally met some of the writers of these memoirs!

18 CASE STUDIES TRACKED OVER A PERIOD OF 10 YEARS TO ANALYSE HOW DEGREE OF MARKET COMPETITION INFLUENCES COUNTERVAILING POWER OF INSTITUTIONS. THE ONLY WORK OF ITS KIND TO DATE

How did a malevolent miserable tale-telling brat who often came to school stinking of urine become a model for millions of young Communists across the Soviet Union? In the 1980s Yuri Druzhnikov decided to find out the truth behind Pavlik Morozov -- allegedly killed by relatives in the 1930s for informing the authorities that his father was hoarding grain -- and produced this stunning book. By talking to Morozov's mother, neighbours and some of the police investigators on the case he builds up a very different picture from the public myth. To say too much more would betray his conclusions, but it's safe to say that here is another of those books which no self-respecting historian of Stalinism can afford to ignore.