Eight Pieces of Empire
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Eight Pieces of Empire: a 20-year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse , by Lawrence Scott Sheets I finally made it to the 90s in my quest through Soviet history! I've had this book on my TBR pile since late last year, but I wanted to read more about the USSR itself before I read about its collapse. This memoir contains some things that I remember--but mostly makes it clear just how much I was not paying attention to world news, at all, in the 1990s (during which I went to college, mostly did not have a TV, got married, and went to grad school; lots of studying and working, not a whole lot else). Lawrence Scott Sheets, on the other hand, spent the 90s and 00s working as a reporter in the former USSR. He sort of defaulted to being a war reporter, despite not actually planning to specialize in war. Here he writes about what he saw and experienced during those years. We start in 1989, with a student Sheets trekking to Russia to work on his language skills. And gets question