Rating: 
Summary: Great subject matter but it's not a "pageturner"
Review: 'In Siberia' is about the author's trek from the Ural Mountains to Magadan in northeastern Siberia, using train, bus, truck, boat, and air. Colin Thubron is not the most engaging of travel writers. He isn't witty, he reveals little of himself, and he isn't good at building his travel narratives around a theme or 'hook.' Thubron's approach is more like that of a journalist - to document what happens to him, what he sees, and the people he encounters. The low spots of the book are due to Thubron's habit of getting bogged down in pointless, over-long interviews. In one instance he spends too much space on a crank-physicist who claims that 'magnetic waves' can cure any disease, and later, on a fringe-archeologist who claims the first humans evolved in Siberia. A couple of pages on these eccentrics might be amusing, but Thubron doesn't know when to move on. Still, the book is of value because it documents an intriguing region at a turning point in history. He describes communities far away from roads and rail lines and, thanks to his fluent Russian, he interviews people there and describes how they see the world. Perhaps most important are his descriptions of the abandoned prison camps, some of which have never been viewed by westerners, and which are scheduled to be bulldozed. His accounts of what the Soviet government did in these camps will stick with the reader long after the book is finished.
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Summary: Through the cold lens
Review: A very sweeping read about the mass of land little explored in the Western press. Language very rich though taxing. The writer is clearly an ex British private school boy, who still sees this part of the world through the unsympathetic prism of the old Cold War enemy.
Rating: 
Summary: A Dark Journey through Russia's Wild East
Review: An ex-political prisoner, an elderly shaman, a vodka-sodden drunk, a KGB agent turned Baptist preacher, a Rasputin lookalike, a lonely babushka - they are all part of the landscape of Siberia brought to life in Colin Thubron's latest masterpiece of travel writing. Siberia's not an easy assignment: covering one- third of the northern hemisphere, it has a haunted past and a harsh present, inevitable, Thubron implies, given Siberia's history as "a rural waste into which were cast the bacilli infecting the state body: the criminal, the sectarian, the politically dissident." Speaking accented Russian in areas where Westerners were forbidden until only a few years ago, Thubron sometimes passes for a down-at-the-heels Estonian as he crosses Siberia, making forays north to desolate Arctic towns founded as Stalinist labor camps. The people he meets stick in the memory, captured with the eye and ear of a novelist. (No surprise there: when not traveling, Thubron writes edgy, dark fiction.) In Rasputin's hometown of Pokrovskoe, Thubron meets Viktor, "a ghastly distillation" of the dark magician, a disturbing man shunned by other villagers. In the Arctic town of Vorkuta, where hundreds of thousands perished in labor camps during Stalin's reign, he finds an old woman watching dubbed Mexican soap operas. She is a faithful Communist, arrested in 1938 on a whispered denunciation and sent to the coal mines for a dozen years. Despite herself, and to Thubron's dismay, she still can't condemn the system that wasted her life. And then there are the babushkas in Omsk, celebrating the blessing of a pool of water near a new Orthodox monastery by plunging in with joyous abandon once the archbishop has moved on. While new-found freedom and hope pop up in odd places, often linked with dormant religions slowly budding to life, darkness prevails in Thubron's account. Looking for traces of the Entsy people, once nomads in northern Siberia, he strands himself with them in the remote village of Potalovo. What he finds is alcoholism, poverty, and despair. Other native peoples, stripped of their cultures under the Soviets and left with the hollow shell of Communism, are equally adrift. And everywhere are reminders of the Gulag, signposts of man's extraordinary capacity for evil. Though the darkness may be palpable, in the hands of a writer as skilled as Thubron, it's not depressing. He's the best travel writer working in English: a traveler, not a tourist, taking risks, uninterested in his own hardships. In Siberia is his best book yet.
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Summary: Great introduction to modern Siberian life
Review: As a two-year resident of Siberia and author of ROAMING RUSSIA: An Adventurer's Guide to Off-the Beaten Track Russia and Siberia, I found this book to be an eloquent account of Thubron's 1998 six-month journey across Siberia. Full of history, life, and hope, this is the best available introduction to modern Siberia.
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Summary: Wonderful book
Review: Beuatiful descriptions, the characters are recognizable. When you read this book you see it all as if you were there. But the information is not all that the book has, it's also a great piece of literature.
Rating: 
Summary: Lost in Siberia
Review: Colin is a gentleman, and a seasoned travel writer, but his book failed to give me what I wanted. He does have a certain alacrity for getting to know the locals, but after awhile, his technique began to appear too predictable. Usually, he went after the older generation, and the religious, or the scientific. His prose is satisfying in some places, but never truly poetic; his ideas frequently go flat after only a few filthy miles. I wanted a view of Siberia from the perspective of a imaginative writer, not a politician. Everybody knows about Stalin and Kreschnev and all those boys. We don't need Colin to keep rubbing the Siberian's past into their own faces. This, in the end, is almost all he accomplishes.
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Summary: Makes You Wish You Were There...Almost
Review: Colin Thubron has done a remarkable job of making a huge area of the world almost intimate, a place so desolate and intimidating seem almost welcoming. That's a tough job--Siberia is one royal mess. Yet all along Thubron's route, he meets the warmest people who could melt even the permafrost around them. His style is engaging and telling, and the mental pictures he creates of a land few people will ever see linger long after the book has been put in a prominent spot in your library. He makes this sad, rotting land almost seem like it would be the next hot travel destination--perhaps exactly what it needs to save it from extinction.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Colin Thubron's book could hardly fail to be interesting given its subject matter. Thubron travelled the Trans-Siberian railway and made other detours through Russia's "Wild Wild East." What he found mostly was a people who are perservering despite living in an immense scarcely populated land that seems cursed by history and memories of the gulags. Some of Thubron's images are riveting and tragic. But unfortunately, his prose leaves a lot to be desired. He often writes in an off-putting second person, and he sometimes lingers on subjects that are just not that interesting. He also provides little context for his journey. He makes little mention of what compelled him to go to Siberia at this particular time, nor does he give any buildup for his travels or reflect on what it means to him. Worse yet, at the end of the book you get no sense of a journey completed. Instead, Thubron simply stopped writing. Overall, this book was a great disappointment. I would recommend searching out Benson Bobrick's superior history of Siberia, "East of the Sun" instead.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Colin Thubron's book could hardly fail to be interesting given its subject matter. Thubron travelled the Trans-Siberian railway and made other detours through Russia's "Wild Wild East." What he found mostly was a people who are perservering despite living in an immense scarcely populated land that seems cursed by history and memories of the gulags. Some of Thubron's images are riveting and tragic. But unfortunately, his prose leaves a lot to be desired. He often writes in an off-putting second person, and he sometimes lingers on subjects that are just not that interesting. He also provides little context for his journey. He makes little mention of what compelled him to go to Siberia at this particular time, nor does he give any buildup for his travels or reflect on what it means to him. Worse yet, at the end of the book you get no sense of a journey completed. Instead, Thubron simply stopped writing. Overall, this book was a great disappointment. I would recommend searching out Benson Bobrick's superior history of Siberia, "East of the Sun" instead.
Rating: 
Summary: Siberian odyssey
Review: Colin Thubron's travel novel "In Siberia" is a great way to escape to a forbidding primitive land, without ever having to go there yourself. This is precisely why I enjoyed reading his book and I think you will also. Mr. Thubron is an exceptional writer and leaves no stone unturned in his quest to discover the mysteries of Siberia. The tale is spun around his encounters with interesting characters hanging on to an imperialist Russia that has long been abandoned, along with commoners that seem to welcome the stranger warmly. He mixes in a bit of cinematic landscape descriptions along with some interesting history lessons. The only problem I had with the book was Mr. Thubron's use of uncommon words that have me baffled to this day. Words such as: glacis, louche, threnody, tarantas, psalteries, chrysalides, coeval, billeted and others left me constantly scrambling for my dictionary, interrupting the flow of the book. Nonetheless, I found the book to be engaging and enjoyable reading while capturing the mystery and otherworldliness of Siberia.
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