Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail (Travel Library, Penguin) [Paperback]

Mary McGarry Morris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1992 | Series: Travel Library, Penguin

Morris present an unforgettable account of her 1986 trip through China, Russia, and Eastern Europe. As in Nothing to Declare, her celebrated travelogue of South America, Morris combines vivid portrayals of people and historical portraits of Soviet events with a more personal journey--her search for roots, family, and her ancestral home in the Ukraine. Reading tour.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Morris superbly recounts her travels through the Soviet Union and China in the last years of the Cold War. Author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

The further travels of Morris, short-story writer and novelist (The Bus of Dreams, 1985, etc.) and author of Nothing to Declare, which documented her adventures as a woman alone on the road in Central America. Morris's brand of travelogue is again unique, never a simple summoning up of pretty landscapes, but rather an intensely personal portrait of self in foreign climes, carrying a full load of emotional baggage. Beijing is her jumping-off point for a journey on the Trans- Siberian Railroad, taking her through Mongolia, over the Urals to Moscow, Leningrad, and at last to the Ukraine--birthplace of her Russian Jewish grandmother. Alas, ten days before she leaves, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster puts the later part of her itinerary in jeopardy. But she perseveres, finding China frustrating since her train tickets aren't forthcoming and she's separated from her ``companion,'' a somewhat ambivalent significant other from back in New York. Her long days on the train across Siberia are a wash of listlessness and garrulous fellow passengers. It isn't until she reaches Moscow that she realizes the Ukraine is too dangerous to attempt, particularly when she discovers she's pregnant. In Leningrad she meets refuseniks and a gentleman who wants to buy her underwear from her, since his girlfriend likes American lingerie. And finally in Berlin she accepts that she'll never reclaim her childhood by visiting her grandmother's homeland--a sorrow tempered by her decision to keep her baby, whether her companion marries her or not. This pre-glasnost travelogue is decidedly grim, solitary, and internal, hardly so high-stepping as Morris's account of her wanderings in Central America. Still, it's an interesting installment in the story of how she changes as she moves over the earth, raising expectations for a third volume documenting future journeys, perhaps with a baby on board. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (June 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 014019939X
• ISBN-13: 978-0140199390
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 4.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #955,689 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #48 in Books > Travel > Asia > China > Beijing

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Customer Reviews

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very interesting snapshot-in-time book., December 23, 2009

By 

Matthew Shapiro (Wilmette, IL., USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail (Hardcover)

This is a very interesting book, about a series of north-Eurasian-corridor lands (China, Mongolia, Russia/Belarus/Ukraine, Poland, and Germany) as they were in 1986, at the dawn of the Gorbachev era but before the breakup of the USSR or the East Bloc could have been seriously envisioned as a realistic possibility.

The book also drives home the fact that geographically Asia and Europe are one and the same continent, with all the movement and give-and-take of peoples (and ideas) that basic fact would allow for and imply. The Eurasian continent's southern half is dominated by a series of high mountain chains, but its northern half (through which the author traveled) is for the most part lowland plain, which makes it a natural conveyor-belt of ralatively easy travel between East and West, for invaders as well as for migrants and tourists. Berlin (the author's endpoint) is just east of the point where the southern mountain-chains compress the northern plain to its narrowest width, thus forcing invaders from the east (like the Mongols, whose empire stretched from Korea to the eastern part of pre-war Germany) to slow down, stop and consolidate their advance. Berlin is thus a natural stopping-point, crossroads and focal point for Eurasia, and it should be one of the world's great cosmopolitan cities, with large communities of prople from every country on that Eurasian continuum from Japan/Korea/China to the Netherlands/Belgium/France/Britain. This book hints at that, albeit by contrast with the state of ruin and lost opportunity that prevailed in 1986 three years before the Wall came down and six years before east-west travel was once again truly free.