Alexei Yurchak

One of rarest cases I gave up. I am an experienced non-fiction reader and was attracted to the theme. Moreover, i'm a native speaker of Russian, thus wasn't irritated by endless italicized Russian words in Latin letters. One thing however made me throw in the towel - I realized this is a PhD thesis and should be marketed like that. A superb, extremely well researched, but still a very scholarly work. I gave it numerous tries, thinking that maybe that chapter on Komsomol inner workings cannot be written any more interesting and readable than that, and chapters on more quotidian matters would happen to be what I want it to be - a good and digestible book on a highly interesting topic. Alas, no such luck. And I'm not picky - I encountered a number of great and deep books on topics even less enticing than this. I'm very sad, but if I were after a scholarly take on it, I would have turned to academic journals or the original thesis, which the author tried to shoehorn into somewhat different genre. I should blame myself - first opening chapter, reviewing previous scholarly work, was very much within the PhD tradition, with level of detalization far exceeding any reasonable boundaries. Name of the publishing house should have warned me too. Anyway, be aware. Still I'm certain it's a great work, hence no star rating.… (mere)