I was actually left with the desire to see the landscapes described. Even what sounds unappealing can have its own beauty. I think that anyone who has driven across the Great Plains, or the salt flats just west of Salt Lake City, in the United States can attest to this. I don't think I would want to spend days (or weeks) traversing such landscape though.

When I read this book last November Crimea was not at all in the news. My interest at the time was a long fascination with Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire extending back to grade school. The description of conditions in the various countries that were formerly part of the USSR was telling and tragic.

The Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin by Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, a book I read early last year, gives a first hand account of how the traditional culture of what is now Kazakhstan was destroyed under Stalin. Just in case anyone here is interested in reading up more about it all.

It really is tragic how the native peoples in these regions had a number done on them twice in less than a century. First under Russian socialism forced to abandon the way of life they had led for centuries and be forced into state controlled collectives, and then when adjusted to that, thrown into a western capitalism system and told Good Luck!