Stories I Stole from Georgia [Hardcover]

Wendell Steavenson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2003

After working for Time magazine in London, Wendell Steavenson spent two years in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Stories I Stole captures the exuberance of a fledgling nation of local despots, mountain tribes, blood feuds, and an unlimited flow of red wine. From President Shevardnadze's rigged elections to horse races high in the mountains; from the eerie roadside artifacts of the Soviet era to the farcical power outages in the dead of winter, here is Georgia: weird, invigorating, and still coming to grips with the legacy of its most famous son, Joseph Stalin. Far more than a travel book, this is a scintillating menagerie of true stories peopled by vivid -- and sometimes insane -- characters. In the beach resort of Sukhumi, once the destination of every fashionable Russian but now wrecked by civil war, Wendell plays hangman with a secret policeman. In the capital, Tbilisi -- ensconced in Levan's Magic Room or lounging in the steam baths -- she hears about the latest duel or kidnapping. In Khevsureti, the meadows are dotted with blue-painted beehives and yellow flowers, while just over the border there is war in Chechnya. Stories I Stole is a candid, engaging, and quietly lyrical book about a land and its people.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this collection of wine-soaked stories, former Time journalist Steavenson recounts her adventurous two years living in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Few journalists would have the gumption to do on assignment what the now 32-year-old Steavenson did on a whim-leave a job in Time's London office in the late 1990s for the relatively volatile region of the Caucasus. Her reward is a book, her first, that Chekhov himself would have admired. With a keen journalistic eye and a poetic flair for capturing every detail of her surroundings, Steavenson adeptly renders a vibrant if rather depressed culture amid the detritus of a collapsed superpower. The book is replete with harsh winters, hot summers, rolling blackouts from a shortage of electricity and a crumbling infrastructure, plentiful vodka and bad cigarettes, hearty friends, and an endless number of LAOs (large abandoned objects): bits of rusting pipeline, tractors, half-built bridges, "the debris of the Soviets, the husk of an empire." While each story seems to contain within it several others, most compelling are Steavenson's encounters with Chechen refugees and fighters after the second Russian war in Chechnya broke out. A chapter on the fixed election of "career communist" turned "western media darling" Eduard Shevardnadze is also insightful. Despite its title, it's clear these stories are anything but stolen. And Steavenson returns the favor. After turning down a marriage proposal from her boyfriend, a photographer, he sends her 1,000 roses-a stunning gesture that is surely still recalled among Georgians. This is a remarkable first effort from a writer to watch.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In 1998, bored with her life in London, Steavenson, a journalist whose CV lists Time magazine in her credits, set out for Tbilisi, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where life is anything but comfortable. The Georgian economy was in such a shambles that it made Russia seem prosperous. Her portraits of the Georgians she befriended are sharply drawn, witty, and convey perfectly the different aspects of "Georgianess." Her portraits of those she interviewed, whether Georgian, Abkhazian, or Chechen, are also finely written pieces, well integrated into the larger story. Steavenson also does a good job of explaining the internecine conflicts in the area. Least interesting is Steavenson's account of her romantic pursuits. A section at the end titled "Ethnic Glossary" sorts out the different peoples of the area. The bibliography, for a change, is actually fun to read. Frank Caso
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (March 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802117376
• ISBN-13: 978-0802117373
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,272,315 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #17 in Books > Travel > Asia > Georgia

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Taste of Post-Soviet Life, August 27, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Stories I Stole from Georgia (Hardcover)

Former Time magazine writer Steavenson hits upon a nice variation to the armchair travel genre with this wonderful little book on the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Rather than trying to systematically detail the small country's tangled web of ethnicities and chaotic recent history, she recounts her time there through twenty chapters/stories. These loosely connected and loosely chronological stories provide a remarkably nuanced portrait of a country where nothing works, government seems largely irrelevant, and the people are remarkable. Weaving in many of her own friendships and a relationship with a photojournalist, she covers rigged elections, ethnic tensions, the nearby war in Chechnya, and mainly daily life with remarkable sensitivity. The nice thing is that she doesn't do so with the usual world-weariness of the foreign corespondent, but with a depth of feeling that never falls into sentimentalism or condescension It's a curiously individual work in that there's no real reason for her to be there, there is no larger theme she hangs her stories on, and no gimmicks. Just honest stories about a country where a strange civil war and two secessionist wars over the last decade have utterly destroyed the economy and left the country with little hope. A definite must read for anyone interested in the Caucuses or the fate of post-Soviet republics.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Flawed, July 30, 2011

By 

C. Dravec "person" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stories I Stole (Paperback)

Stories I Stole is a difficult work to pin down in terms of tone-neither completely a work of journalism, nor of memoir, though it certainly leans to the latter. As a whole, the book is rather poorly written, both in terms of style and of grammar-I found myself searching for a way to make sense out of several poorly conceived sentences.
The book has the tone of a blog-chatty, confessional, and narcissistic, with literary flourishes that appear out of nowhere and seem largely out of place. What makes this book frustrating is that when the author isn't making light of the novelty of being a Westerner in the wild, wild east, and when she isn't talking about her motley group of journalist or other ex-pat comrades (that is, when she takes the too-rare moment to discuss Georgia and actual Georgians) I found the book hard to put down.
For those who wish to learn something in-depth about Georgia, this is not the book to read. Steavenson makes little effort to contextualize events such as the Russian war with Chechnya happening just across the border or Georgia's long, complicated history. The blasé manner in which she offhandedly summarizes the state of the country repeatedly begins to grate on the nerves of a reader with higher expectations from creative non-fiction such as this. Furthermore, the book reeks of a privileged, oblivious and ultimately uninterested perspective. It's doubtful Steavenson stole very many stories, for the main story she presents us with here is her own, and while amusing at times, it's not terribly interesting.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Hangover, January 16, 2010

By 

Todd (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stories I Stole (Paperback)

This was an interesting, and at times exciting, book on the recent history of the Georgia. We had a guest from Georgia stay with us right after I finished reading the book and she verified just about everything in it. It's written in the same world-weary, ironic style as other travel writers like Paul Theroux. If you like that kind of dry, dark wit, you'll like this book. If you like your travel writing a la Conde Nast, you won't make it past the first chapter. So many of the tales start with a night of heavy drinking and smoking that it was not long before I began to feel my head throb and my throat get raw vicariously.

I would have given the book five stars if the author had left out the two-and-a half chapters about her boyfriend. I found them distracting from what was otherwise a great book.