Ticket to Latvia: A Journey from Berlin to the Baltic (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Although books about Eastern Europe tend these days to become outdated even as they are being written, the British author's journey, related with delightfully subtle wit, has period charm. A lone traveler making his way from the Federal Republic across the Berlin Wall to the DDR, on to Prague, Cracow, Riga, Vilnius and Leningrad, Tanner, a one-time Anglican seminarian and now a correspondent in Belgrade, seems not to have detected signs of the ferment about to erupt. He found the mainline DDR folk "pronouncedly bourgeois"; that the Czechs "neither learn nor forget anything"; that the Poles are enterprising at fleecing the Western tourist; that in Vilnius and Leningrad, even with Intourist to take over the burden of arranging his accommodations, his hotels proved to be "dumps." The main interest in the book, however, is in the history Tanner relates, especially about unfamiliar Lithuania.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Less than a year ago, this might have been considered an intriguing, though eccentric, glimpse of life in the Eastern bloc. Now, however, given the stunning collapse of the Communist order in Europe, Ticket to Latvia survives only as a very thin piece of period literature. In many respects, the work is similar to the hundreds of 19th-century travelogs done by wealthy or enterprising travelers before the age of mass communication. Digressions on local architecture abound, as do stories of interesting folk and good food discovered along the way. Though engagingly written, Tanner's observations are generally simplistic and sometimes painfully superficial. More than anything else this book is a casualty of the information age. Recommended only for libraries with large Eastern European collections.
- Joseph W. Constance Jr., Boston Coll. Lib., Chestnut Hill, Mass.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 197 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co; 1st Owl Book ed edition (August 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805013466
• ISBN-13: 978-0805013467
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6,654,720 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too much information, not enough scenes, September 19, 2002

By	Glen Engel Cox "www.engel-cox.org" (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The common dictum in fiction writing is "show, don't tell." That is, to keep your reader interested, it is much more involving to "show" the scene, idea, instance, or action, than to "tell." Interestingly, I think that this dictum goes beyond fiction. I've never been much of a history buff. Part of this is because of how they teach it in our public schools--dry facts and actions, later to be regurgitated on multiple-choice tests. But history can be interesting, when it's shown rather than told. What is a story--hi-story? --but a history of what happened, is happening, or will happen? Or, to illustrate the point, remember a move from the 80s called "Teachers," starring Nick Nolte? Also appear was that crazy guy from "Soap" (Richard Mulligan?) as an escaped loony who "takes over" for the history professor. Every time you see him, he's in a new costume: Caesar, Napeleon, George Washington. He's creating dioramas in his classroom. Now, there's something to remember history through!

What does this have to do with Marcos Tanner's travelogue through Eastern Europe? I'm sure you've already guessed it. Tanner has forgotten, if he ever knew it (he's a journalist; the dictum in journalism is the pyramid structure, where the most important facts are told first, the next most important next, ad infinitum), that he needs to show us things. It's not that he doesn't do so entirely. The memories I have from this book consist of several cases of showing. But he intersperses dry-fact history among those scenes, effectively killing any momentum that he could have had. In fiction we have another term for this injection of background, history or full descriptino in the text; we call it "information dumping." It's not that Tanner doesn't know of what he speaks, but he overloads the book (at least fifty percent) with extraneous background in sections, rather than working it in with his travels.