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As a teenager in South Texas, the author saw too many former high school students still roaming letterman-jacketed through the halls and spending Friday night drinking in the Taco Bell parking lot years after graduation. She vowed not to be one of them. Stephanie Griest viewed becoming a reporter as the perfect escape from Corpus Christi, and when a CNN correspondent at a journalism conference provided the how-to-be-like-me prescription of 'Learn Russian', that's exactly what she did, enrolling in Russian at the University of Texas. In January of 1996, Stephanie headed to Moscow looking for some excitement and soon became fixated upon a style of governmwent that as a child she had imagined to be one giant monolithic empire. She had just taken her first step toward what would turn out to be a four-year, multi-nation tour that shattered all her preconceived notions of Communism. In this trade paperback original, Stephanie relates her experiences as a University student in Moscow, an editor of the Chinese Communist Party's English mouthpiece in Beijing, and an illegal alien in Havana. AROUND THE BLOC is the absorbing story of a young journalist-in-the-making compelled by a desire to witness the effects of Communism, and Stephanie gets into the rhythm of everyday life - from the sizzling banyas of Russia to China's underground art galleries to impromptu dance lessons with a mistress of rumba in Cuba. Between meals of yak penis soup and snake's blood, she learns the Russian mathematical equation for buying dinner party vodka (1 bottle per guest plus an extra), begins to understand why so many Chinese citizens are not the dissidents she had expected, and meets Cuban hip-hop artists who rap about keeping the revolution alive. Along the way, our intrepid heroine falls in and out of love with a dashing descendant of Tolstoy, fights to keep the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen's I'm on Fire safe from the censor's wrath, marches with a Fidel-mandated mothers' demonstration in support of returning Elian to Cuba, and ultimately looks inward.
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522mm x 802mm, 65g
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| Item Code |
BOO-654597242 |
| Item Name |
AROUND THE BLOC |
| ISBN |
9780812967609 |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Author/Artist |
STEPHANIE ELIZOND GRIEST |
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