Most books on the subject of radio tend to give short shrift to college radio stations. Having worked for a few, including a stint as station manager for WPTS at Pitt, I started an outline in 1995 of what a book dedicated to college radio might look like. Alas, teaching during the day and running an indy label in the evening and managing bands at night, I never got around to writing more than a chapter. Sauls has gone and written the book! And a good book it is! I recommend this work for anyone who worked (or is currently or wants to work) for a college radio station. Not so much for the listeners, the book gives students the entire lowdown on starting and running a station. It needs to include LPFM and webcasting information - this was sort of skimmed over (and "audionet" no longer goes by that moniker). At times the book does read a little too much like a textbook, but in other segments (like the one written by McKenzie) the information is highly readable and informative. Bonus points for the appendices, a risky move since a lot of this stuff can become outdated before a book goes to print. Dr. Sauls if you're thinking about a second edition or another book along these lines, please e-mail me and we can exchange notes! Anyone else should buy this book right now!

Sharon Hudgins and her husband took teaching jobs in Irkutsk and Vladivostok, two major cities in Siberia. They had to adjust to life in post-Soviet Russia, a far cry from the way things were at the University of Maryland, where they held teaching positions.

Hudgins is a food and travel writer, so there is much detail about the food, cooking and grocery supplies in Russia. In fact, several chapters seemed pretty much one party after another with the hospitable Russians, who love a get-together with good food and drink, and party hard all night. It's a good way to ignore the intermittant electricity, lack of running water and other infrastructure problems that plague the crumbling post-Soviet urban landscape.

The most interesting part of the book was a stint in Ulan-Ude, capital of the Buryat Republic. The Buryat are a Mongolian people, cousins of the Mongol Horde of Genghis Khan. The only Tibetan lamasery (monastery) is in Ulan-Ude. The Buryat Republic borders Lake Baikal, the deepest, oldest lake in the world, home to unique species of flora and fauna and a fascinating place to read about.

This is a fascinating travel book, with a lot of fun anecdotes and stories about horrific train rides, scary food (a sheep's head with the wool still on it, and blood pudding in a sheep's stomach, no way to say "no thank you" to the amiable hosts who are putting on a real spread for their guests.) If you are interested in Russia, in a part of Russia most Westerners never visit, you should read "The Other Side of Russia."

This is an excellent book, beautifully written and presented. I have not (yet) visited Ukraine, but it is my intention to visit Lvov and Kiev (I have spelt them the 'old way' not the Ukrainian way) in the near future. Mrs. Savage's book conveys a real 'feel' for Ukraine and a real love. Even without interest in Ukraine, her story is a most interesting and compelling one for any lecturer or teacher living in a strange country.

Anna Savage left Ukraine as a little girl during the chaos of World War II and returned as an American journalist shortly after Ukraine became an independent country in 1991 These bookends of her life provide the context for a detailed portrait of life in post-communist Ukraine, historical background necessary to understand that portrait and one family's search for its roots. Ms. Savage is able to combine her journalist's eye for a story with her family's stories about a homeland she scarcely recalls. She is also very honest in depicting the reactions of herself, her mother and her aunt upon return to a homeland that is now less than idyllic.

Excellent book. It gives the reader a mixture of a travelogue and bits of history.Highly recommended for persons that intend to travel to Ukraine, conduct some business and especially for the diplomats, not familiar with Ukraine. There are some minor historical inaccuracies, but in general it is an excellent source for people not familiar with that part of the world.

A great intellectual reading, even thoug it might not appeal to the taste of nationalists in the balkans. As a Greek-American living in Greece during the Kosovo war, I was appalled at the huge pro-bias of the greek media toward Milosevic's regime and its crimes. This books goes along away to answer a lot of questions.

I witnessed even worse things during my 20 years in that country. Greece started moving into the area of political schizophrenia, business anarchy, and educational apathy when the former ideological supporters of Stalin and the USSR took over the media. How many people know that in the Greek media, the FED (Federal Reserve) of the U.S. was mentioned as "a group of Jewish banks"? How many people know that in the junior class of high-school back in 1985, students were taught in Greece that "Albania is an industrial country with mechanized agriculture"?. How many people know that Greeks propagate the strongest anti-American slogans in Europe? How many people know that Greeks were saying "they deserved it" for the Americans after Sep 11? How many people know that Greeks "boooed" the victims of Sep 11 in public stadiums the weekend after the attack? How many people know that Greeks, even in these days, write in their forums on the internet that "we wish that all Americans die like in Sep 11"? How many people know that the Greek singer Dalaras comes to the US giving concerts and at the end, each time, he mocks the US government and back in Greee he states that "Americans have murder in their DNAs", and then the Greek media supports his statements with journalists writing in major newspapers articles like "I hate America"? How many people know that Greek journalists stated during the war in Iraq that "Sadam Husein's mistake was that he didn't have any weapons of mass destruction to throw to the Americans"?

Things like that... and even worse...Takis Mihas is a very brave soul, and a cream of the crop journalist. His place should be near the top executives of World class media. In Greece, talented researchers and journalists' like Takis Mihas barely have the means to live comfortably, going AGAINST the general trend, speaking tghe truth, instead of chosing easy topics to make money... Takis Mihas describes a country which is exactly like the one I lived in for 22 years... and it's still going down. His writing follows the general writing trend in "modern" Greece, which is tense, highly argumentative, but he escapes controversies by remaining truthful and by insisting on the facts.

I would also highly recommend "The Black Book of Communism", a book that has been badly critisized only in Greece, a country which remains the last castle of fascist media and journalists who adore Stalin -- of course, a tourist would never even realize that, in the same way in which the ample sunshine covers mizery in Cuba. The beautiful landscape in Greece serves wonderfully as an excellent cover-up for the socio-political misery... the land of the "family values" (so the Americans believe) is the country that holds the No.1 position in illegal prostitution in the European Union... today's Parthenon is filled up with prostitutes from the former socialist countries, with drugs, thieves, political, economical and social anarchy.

History will soon be forgotten... however, books like these should be kept, so that our children know what happened, who caused it, and who supported it.

Thank God I'm not there anymore... there hasn't been a day ever since I left that I'm not grateful for all the freedoms, opportunities and mainly common sense (yes, compared to Greece even Afghanistan have more common sense and basic respect) that I enjoy in the U.S. ever since I came here.

PS. The head of the Greek church Christodoulos, supported indirectly the terrorists of Sep 11, by endorsing their geopolitical views... more on the internet.

Reading this book one is amazed at how the West still tolerates Greece's childish and irresposible behaviour in the Balkans.
The more I read about Greece the more I realize that it has no place in the EU or NATO. Not only did Greece condone the ethnic cleansing committed by Milosevic against the Albanians, Greece itself has been involved since it's creation in it's own ethnic cleansing of Chams and other Albanians in northern Greece not to mention the inhumane treatment of the Albanian emmigrants.

It seems fairly obvious that the two authors were in a rush to get this book out before the competition, since there is not much depth here, and more than a few typographical errors. One major annoyance was the spelling of commonly-accepted place- and proper names with the Lithuanian variant: confusing if you use other sources about the war.

This is basically a blow-by-blow of the war in Chechnya from December 94 to the end of 1996. While initially, I had hope for some insights, what I found was more of a chronology of the war, basically gleaned from Lithuanian (and some Russian) newspapers. Unfortunately, the preface triumphs this achievement as one that come to us through the "native" eyes of east Europeans, who are not subject to the bias of "western sources." What I found especially disappointing was the fact that the authors did not conduct one interview for the book (contrasting with the works of some supposedly "biased" Western journalists such as Carlotta Gall, who was actually IN Chechnya, and interviewed President Dudaev twice).

I don't mean to say that you have to actually be present in the war zone to write a good history of the war, but I simply did not see how Knezys and Sedlickas' book was all that original or insightful.

On the plus side, if you do not want to search for a chronology of the war in the internet, this may be useful - however, all of the Russian-language newspapers cited can be accessed by Westerners through FBIS.

This book was touted as an objective and evenhanded analysis of the military side of the Chechen war of 1994-96. It is simply not so. In fact it often reads like a propaganda pamphlet, pro-Chechen and anti-Russian in this case.

To give it a due credit, the book has some strong points. It is sufficiently detailed and provides a complete timeline of the conflict. Its analysis of war, while very partial, contains some interesting insights (for example, on the role of military terrorism). At the same time one of the book's drawback is highly derivative description of the events. It seems the authors have never been anywhere near Chechnya or interviewed main participants of this war. Instead they rely almost exclusively on reports written elsewhere - mainly in Russian and western newspapers (and also Lithuanian ones).

The authors begin with political circumstances leading to war. Like other parts of the book the description is very biased. They hardly mention, for example, a series of terrorist acts and hostage-taking (including several instances of kidnapping buses with schoolchildren) persisting in and around Chechnya in 1994, which was a final trigger for hostilities as lawlessness and violence in Chechnya has grown to intolerable proportions. Any western government in these circumstances would be just as hard pressed to "finally get tough on terrorists" as Russian government in the late 1994. Both sides, Russian and Chechen, can be faulted for gradual escalation and eventual stumbling into the brutal war. Much more objective and substantial take on this issue can be found in A. Lieven's "Chechnya: The Tombstone of Russian Power".

In describing the military side of the war S. Knezys and R. Sedlickas use many sketches and maps, with level of details sometimes down to individual vehicles destroyed or soldiers killed. These maps, however, often feel disconnected from the story and offer fairly little help in understanding combat situations. The narrative often resembles the language of a bureaucratic report. There is no comparison, for example, to the Mark Bowden's "Black Hawk Down" in vividness of describing gritty details of military engagements in a modern war. In fact, the writing reminds of Prussian pedantry that Lev Tolstoy mocked in "War and Peace": "First battalion marches..., second battalion marches...". Authors managed to make one of the most ferocious combats in recent history simply boring.

They also use very unconventional English transliteration of names and locations (based, it appears, on Lithuanian spelling). Not that the authors make even this consistent. For example, Yeltsin spelled as traditionally in English literature, while phonetically similar first letter in other names is spelled with "J" (e.g. Jegorov, or sometimes Jagorov). The authors are fairly sloppy and occasionally spell the same name differently within a single page (for example, Dudaev's wife name is alternately called Ala, Alla or Ada). One of the authors (Knezys) was educated in Soviet Union and surely has at least a basic grasp of Russian. Yet Russian names and places mentioned in the book often sound as if they are distorted on purpose to lose original meaning. Is it a quirky excursion into Luthuanian nationalism? There is nothing wrong with presenting the point of view of smaller nations, but distorting grammar and phonetics for this purpose looks downright silly.

Describing humanitarian aspects of the war authors detail almost all Russian atrocities ever mentioned in media, of various degree of credibility, but barely mention at all the Chechen ones, including well-documented horrible tortures and mutilation of captured Russian soldiers (and often civilians). They write, for example, how Chechens allegedly protected Russian POWs in the basement of Dudaev's presidential palace in Grozny, as Russian troops were storming it. What they don't mention is that Chechens fighters tied (and even nailed) many captured soldiers to windowsills, often stripped naked in January cold, while their snipers were shooting at attacking Russian troops using these prisoners as covers.

Almost every operation by Chechen forces is described as complete success from military point of view, while on Russian side - invariable bungling and failure. This is in line of how it was often portrayed in the media, but doesn't necessarily stand the scrutiny of common sense and logic (although Chechens indeed often proved to be very capable fighters). For example, authors describe Chechen attacks on parts of Gudermes in December '95 and of Grozny in March '96 as well-planned and perfectly successful "rehearsals" of the eventual operation to take Grozny in August '96, after which Russia decided to end the war and withdraw its troops. Despite being army officers, the authors apparently can't comprehend a simple concept: there is no such thing as a "repetition" of a military operation. In case a of pre-planned decisive strike, the army unit either completes its task, or fails at it and falls back to prepare and plan anew, with modified means and tactics, while the other side makes its own conclusions and designs countermeasures. Undoubtedly, had the Chechen army attack on Grozny in August '96 been not successful, they would have called it yet another "planned rehearsal", just as previous operations in December '95 and March '96. Similarly, they call terrorist raids on civilian targets inside Russia by the bands of field commanders Shamil Basaev in June '95 and Salman Raduev in December '95 (fully justified in author's description, even as these attacks included cold-blooded killing of civilian hostages) as total successes from military point of view. This is arguably the case for the first raid (Basaev's), but less likely for Raduev's band, which lost more than half of its fighters (Raduev was recently captured by Russian special forces and is now in prison).

Overall, the book is too flawed to receive a high mark. Nevertheless, it remains the most detailed military account of Chechen war in the western media, and can be recommended to readers interested in this subject.

I think in this book will be very good for the readers who want to know about 1994-96 chechnya war. Author show why russians does not win the war. The whole war is described quite precisious (as it can be:): battles, tactics, etc... And i think this book will be ok for readers who want to study 1999-x war.It will bring some answers to emerging questions in our days.