So, yesterday was the official kick-off of the Keep Portland Weird festival here in Paris, which meant that I had a reading/screening in the...
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Warning: Lost in Moscow is so funny that I fell off a coffee shop stool and couldn't get off the floor because I couldn't stop laughing.
I'm a huge fan of literary travel but you don't have to be to enjoy Lost in Moscow. It's a true story but it reads like fiction...actually much of the book is dialogue and action and there aren't any long flowery descriptions of Russia at all; though there are hilarious long descriptions of humiliating toilets, ugly food, a scary hospital, deadly parachuting and swimming in a sea of jellyfish...the Black Sea that is, because that is where the author was sent in 1977. She was sent away from the western world by her family to spend her summer at a Soviet communist summer camp in the USSR. And it's not just any old camp. This happens to be the camp where the USSR sends it champion teenagers. The teens that are going into the Olympics, the military, becoming cosmonauts, or brain surgeons....little 11-yr-old Kirsten Koza, a normal kid from North America is pitted against the USSR's best-of-their-best! And boy-oh-boy, she gets into trouble!
This was a really fun read. I've recently been to Russia and even though it's no longer a communist nation....I could relate to so many things, so much of what she described is still there today!
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Lost in Moscow by Kirsten Koza
quintathlete, June 16, 2006
Warning: Lost in Moscow is so funny that I fell off a coffee shop stool and couldn't get off the floor because I couldn't stop laughing.I'm a huge fan of literary travel but you don't have to be to enjoy Lost in Moscow. It's a true story but it reads like fiction...actually much of the book is dialogue and action and there aren't any long flowery descriptions of Russia at all; though there are hilarious long descriptions of humiliating toilets, ugly food, a scary hospital, deadly parachuting and swimming in a sea of jellyfish...the Black Sea that is, because that is where the author was sent in 1977. She was sent away from the western world by her family to spend her summer at a Soviet communist summer camp in the USSR. And it's not just any old camp. This happens to be the camp where the USSR sends it champion teenagers. The teens that are going into the Olympics, the military, becoming cosmonauts, or brain surgeons....little 11-yr-old Kirsten Koza, a normal kid from North America is pitted against the USSR's best-of-their-best! And boy-oh-boy, she gets into trouble!
This was a really fun read. I've recently been to Russia and even though it's no longer a communist nation....I could relate to so many things, so much of what she described is still there today!
(5 of 5 readers found this comment helpful)