The Gingerbread Race

At the height of the era of rhetorical antagonism known as the Cold War, a young man, son and grandson of Russian writers, crossed the border to the West. He had never attended Soviet school and spent his childhood reading Xenophon in the fabulous seclusion of a summer enclave near Moscow, where Stalin's henchmen, like Andrei Gromyko, had their villas. Escape to freedom was an obsessive dream, as it had been his father's and grandfather's. What would he find in New York and London, when this dream came true? If ideas are born, live and have a history, this book is an autobiography of ideas. Dissecting illusion with reality, the book is a clinical post-mortem of the social organisms once known as the East and the West. It is also a ruthless glimpse of their mutual interpretation, and gradual transformation into a social hybrid with precedent.