Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana [Paperback]

Stephanie Elizondo Griest (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 9, 2004

Desperate to escape South Texas, Stephanie Elizondo Griest dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent. So she headed to Russia looking for some excitement—commencing what would become a four-year, twelve-nation Communist bloc tour that shattered her preconceived notions of the “Evil Empire.”

In Around the Bloc, Griest relates her experiences as a volunteer at a children’s shelter in Moscow, a propaganda polisher at the office of the Chinese Communist Party’s English-language mouthpiece in Beijing, and a belly dancer among the rumba queens of Havana. She falls in love with an ex-soldier who narrowly avoided radiation cleanup duties at Chernobyl, hangs out with Cuban hip-hop artists, and comes to difficult realizations about the meaning of democracy.

is the absorbing story of a young journalist driven by a desire to witness the effects of Communism. Along the way, she learns the Russian mathematical equation for buying dinner-party vodka (one bottle per guest, plus an extra), stumbles upon Beijing’s underground gay scene, marches with 100,000 mothers demanding Elián González’s return to Cuba, and gains a new appreciation for the Mexican culture she left behind.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When Griest was a high school senior in Texas, a CNN correspondent told her that if she wanted a globe-hopping career like his, she should learn Russian. Four years later, she went to Moscow and spent a semester at a linguistic institute, beginning a four-year period of travel (1996-2000) to 12 nations, including much of the former Soviet bloc and Communist China and Cuba. Readers will quickly intuit just how little of Griest's adventures made it into this account, as a two-month Central Asian trek gets a single sentence and Eastern Europe falls completely by the wayside. But there's little opportunity to regret what's missing because of the captivating stories that Griest does choose to tell. From the sight of an old woman stealing canned goods from a shopper who'd passed out in a Moscow grocery to the aggressive banter of Havana black marketers, Griest has a journalist's eye for compelling detail. Her youthful romantic attraction to "the Revolution" is slightly less attractive, at times treating the largely defeated Communist movement as almost exotic, and naive daydreams about matters like the "damn good loving" she might find from angst-ridden Beijing men can occasionally induce winces. But she doesn't flinch from depicting the brutal effects of authoritarianism and economic decline, or how her experiences hastened her political and emotional maturity. Though still raw in places, Griest's writing shows great promise; she may wind up joining Tom Bissell (Chasing the Sea) in the vanguard of a new generation of travel writers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Griest begins her travel memoir with a promising theme: at 21, she set off for Moscow with some fellow Texas college students in an attempt to strengthen her Russian language ability and deepen her understanding of Russian culture. Griest accomplishes the goal of changing her misconceptions not only about the Russians but also about the Chinese and Cubans, by spending the next four years traveling and living among them. Along the way, she has many surprising, bizarre, and even touching experiences. Yet, despite her informal journalistic approach (which is wonderfully accessible and conversational), there are moments of immaturity in her accounts that make the book seem more like a collegian's diary than a poignant journalistic endeavor. Her travelogue is, therefore, "in your face," for better or worse, and because of this may well appeal most to twentysomething readers. However, Griest is a fine observer, open to experiences and frank in expression, and she certainly is entertaining. Janet St. John
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Villard (March 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812967607
• ISBN-13: 978-0812967609
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #387,515 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #10 in Books > Travel > Caribbean > Cuba > Havana
  • #11 in Books > Travel > Asia > Russia > Moscow
  • #19 in Books > Travel > Asia > China > Beijing

More About the Author

Stephanie Elizondo Griest has mingled with the Russian Mafiya, polished Chinese propaganda, and belly danced with Cuban rumba queens. These adventures are the subject of her award-winning first book "Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana" (Villard/Random House, 2004). Atria/Simon & Schuster will publish her memoirs from Mexico in 2008, and Travelers' Tales published her guidebook "100 Places Every Woman Should Go" in February 2007. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Latina Magazine, and numerous Travelers' Tales anthologies. An avid traveler, she has explored 25 countries and once spent a year driving 45,000 miles across the United States, documenting its history for a website for kids called The Odyssey. She has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and is currently a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute and a Board Member of the National Coalition Against Censorship. Please visit her site at www.aroundthebloc.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Move over Bryson, March 18, 2004

By 

Daniel E. Doremus (Columbus, OH United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Paperback)

I rarely buy into the "so good you can't put it down" rhetoric when talking about books to read. Stephanie Griest's Around the Bloc is an exception. Reminiscent of my favorite, Bill Bryson, she has an amazing combination of detail, brilliant humor, and historical research that both teaches and entertains. This is a book that can profoundly change the way young people look at foreign travel or foreign study. I would recommend it to anyone wanting to study abroad as a guidebook for how to truly capture the essense of cultural immersion. Griest's re-discovery of her own culture through learning about others is an inspiring gem of a lesson.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A "coming of age story" sounds just way too cliched for this hombre...lo siento..., November 19, 2006

By 

Adam Daniel Mezei "Adam Daniel Mezei" (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Paperback)

Ay, caramba!

AROUND THE BLOC is more than a coming of age story, dear Readers.

The following is a laundry list of what you're genuinely missing when you ascribe such facile titles to this amazing little read:

1) The wonderful (and many) impactful lines of prose that emanate from the pen of someone so young, yet with so much on the ball (at the time of writing, that is -- the "young" part, not the "on the ball" part). Griest is possessed of an awareness that few individuals of mixed ethnicity and/or race choose to properly acknowledge. Inside the pages of this book, Elizondo Griest attacks this concept with a doggedness and reckless deliberation that's so downright inspirational! I would like to travel in her wake.

2) There were several passages which I came across where I just had to place the book down beside me to take a deep "resetting" breath. How author managed to touch so many sensitive chords within me, I'm positive the effect was similar on the others. Ms. Elizondo Griest doesn't hold punches. When she refers to things like love, lust, heartbreak, depression, devastation, and sex, she does **precisely** that. When Griest refers to how pained she was when the man who meant everything in her life dropped her for the second time (in as many chances), you hurt right along there with her. If you don't, you don't have much of a emotional bone within your body. Someone so outspoken and delightful doesn't deserve to get hurt like that. At least this was my initial reaction.

3) This is a young woman who has criss-crossed the world and back again, all in an attempt to seek the answers for the most essential life-donning questions which those of us who take such things for granted are never inclined to ask. Essential burning questions of indentity. Of the need and desire to understand who she really is at her core--not as a by-product of some consumerist collective--or where she really came from. By dipping into the collective unconsciousness of several nations of which she herself wasn't a descendant (Russia, China)...then beginning to relate these lessons to the things she knew and loved about herself (which came about more in Havana). Just gorgeous. In several spots the narrative, the author delivered up this story with a dramatist's expert flourish.

~~~~

The pages just turned. I never **once** felt a need to stop reading (the only time I had was because I'd been interupted by something other than the read).

Intentionally, I believe, Griest constructs the narrative with a rising crescendo. The story commences in Moscow, Russia and moves through Beijing, China. As the journey concludes in Havana, Cuba, in a country closest to her US home, Stephanie comes face to face with a daemon which has been dogging her for most of her early adult life.

When she least expects to find the answer which has been plaguing her mercilessly, as she describes it, it confronts her hard. It hammers her when she finds herself doing an activity which one might consider enough to pull her thoughts away from such critical existential questions. Dancing the rhumba, or talking with a couple of Cuban college students on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean.

Rather than writing AROUND THE BLOC and ending things with a question mark, Elizondo Griest is even more convinced by the book's end about the righteousness of her choice of having travelled around the entire world, steadfast in her desire to want to know more about her essential self.

Like a highly sympathetic character in a novel or a film, you really want this person to succeed--dareisay win (?)--because the righteousness of her mission is just so important. It becomes as important to you as it initially is to Stephanie.

Haven't we all had such dilemmas in our life?

In this age of mixed identities, to be able to claim a purity of a connection to one's ancient or not-so-ancient culture is indeed a complicated decision, rife with paradoxes.

Even those who are "so-and-so"--how much of that "so-and-so" can they really be in the face of an environment which pulls them into defining themselves as something much more general than merely the binding specificity of one particular race or (former?) nation-state?

There are so many things which lay claim to our selves, at our cores. Griest cannot be blamed for having been sucked into this simplifying evening-out vortex, too. So deep has she been submerged into the commonality of the "Western experience," that it has become a compelling struggle to pull herself out. Like it is for others in her situation, who have written about things similarly.

It has been an honour and a privilege to follow her along her path. I can't thank her enough for having made me a part.

It's been to a gift to witness the changes, as she wrote about them, and as the book appears to be the culmination of many months and years of introspection and sometimes piercing self-doubt.

I've cherished each and every one of these pages. Thank you Stephanie.

If there ever were a sixth Amazonian star, it would go to Stephanie Elizondo Griest.

--ADM in Prague

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than a memoir -- an amazing read!!, March 10, 2004

By 

Daphne Sorensen (Mozambique, Africa) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Paperback)

I loved this book for many reasons, including the fact that it is as much a travelogue as it is a memoir (and a "Communist 101" history lesson)! Griest is funny and candid about her own initial misconceptions and cultural misshaps (her account of the Chinese lunch with her new colleagues is priceless!), but she still manages to bring her stories to life, avoiding caricatures and cliches.

Some of Griest's experiences resonated with me, like the challenges of settling into life in a foreign city. Although I have never traveled through China or Russia, her amazing gift for story-telling made the places and people in her book seem surprisingly familiar.

I highly recommend "Around the Bloc"!!! And I can't wait to see where she travels to next!