Ian Frazier

Ian Frazier's is a masterful writer and his Travels in Siberia may be his best work He weaves nuggets of history and geography with his intrepid travels through the land mass of Siberia--one-twelfth of the earth's land. Before making his first foray into the land, he approaches his subject from Alaska, never quite making it. In his second venture, he travels by van eastward into ever remote areas of the land. I especially appreciate his boyish enthusiasm for his adventures and the travelers like George Keenan, a fellow Midwesterner who went before him in the 1860s. Indeed, he remarks on how the Ohio natives and other Midwesterners make up a disproportionate number of American travelers who were drawn to Siberia. Frazier has the ability to bring the exotic world of Siberia to life with him back to New York where he finds sensory reminders of Siberia in sable coats and Russian gas stations. In a later trip he finds one of the hundreds of abandoned gulags connecting it as the physical symbol of Stalin's cruel mind. His powers of perception observe both incredible beauty in the land, women, and food as well as dark stores of horror by travelers driven mad from their travels. Read it.… (mere)

Ian Frazier's "Travels in Siberia" is an excellent travel book on a place I do not want to travel to. In it, he reports on five visits to that enormous place, intertwined with interesting reports on Siberian and Russian history, and with vignettes of (relatively) current Russian mores and manners. ("Relatively" because the book was written in 2010: an update would be much appreciated). Frazier's reporting is personal, witty and often horrifying. Travel in Siberia was incredibly difficult: when he took it, the main trans-Siberian road had a gap that had to be filled in by hauling cars and passengers across a 500 mile roadless waste. Cold is of course a feature for all but a few months of the year, but so are bugs, and ubiquitous mountains of trash. Some bits sound interesting -- Lake Baikal, for one -- but in general the book damped my already minimal interest in going to Siberia. For arm chair travellers, however, it's a great read.… (mere)

This book has been on my TBR for years; the title appealed to me in the moment - I'm not a mommy but I can curse with the best of them. A few months ago, I had it in hand to purge, but I read the flap and the author is a New Yorker columnist so I held it back. After reading Are We Having Fun Yet by Lucy Mangan, I thought it would be the right time to read this one as a comparison of sorts: how would the American version of the concept compare to the UK version? How would a male author's portrayal of a columnist-working-from-home mother of two stack up against the same dynamic in the UK?

It didn't, obviously. I wasn't able to make it through February. But I'm not sure this is a condemnation; it's just a very different delivery and one that ultimately didn't suit me at all because - hilariously - of the swearing.

Do you remember the comedian Sam Kennison? For those that don't, he was an American stand-up comedian and actor. A former Pentecostal preacher, he performed stand-up routines that were characterized by intense sudden tirades, punctuated with his distinctive scream, similar to charismatic preachers. The Screaming Mommy is the Sam Kennison of mommy diarists, and I think you have to have a certain sense of humor to appreciate it. Entire paragraphs of all-caps profanity, using f*ck as every part of speech, usually in the same sentence.

Apart from that, it's not bad, but still didn't work as a book; if I skipped those tirades, the narrative still failed to connect with me and frankly, I found some of it disturbingly hypocritical - like when she's wondering why her 12-year-old son needs to be medicated to control his angry, emotional outbursts in school, as she's smashing an entire sink full of dishes with a hammer because she tried to rinse her hands off, and the splash back from a dirty cereal bowl stained her silk blouse.

In the author's defence, this book was based on a series of columns written for The New Yorker, and as columns, I think they'd have worked much better; outbursts like this are probably easier to chuckle over when they're fed to the audience once a month. All together like this in book form, it's just way too much. Lucy Mangan manages to convey the same frustration and angst in a way the reader can laugh with, rather than feeling as though they're laughing at the crazy person who escaped the asylum, and she manages to do it with a semblance of continuing plot, or at least character, development.… (mere)