A Hunger for Tales of Life in the American Cul-de-Sac By ELLEN BARRY December 10, 2012
MOSCOW - After 20 years of opining on weighty bilateral issues like NATO expansion and ballistic missile defense, the political analyst Nikolai V. Zlobin recently found himself trying to explain, for an uncomprehending Russian readership, the American phenomenon of the teenage baby sitter. In Russia, children are raised by their grandmothers, or, if their grandmothers are not available, by women of the same generation in a similar state of unremitting vigilance against the hazards - like weather - that arise in everyday life. An average Russian mother would no sooner entrust her children's upbringing to a local teenager than to a pack of wild dogs. But of course much in everyday American life sounds bizarre to Russians, as Mr. Zlobin documents meticulously in his 400-page book, "America - What a Life!" It seems strange, 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, that ordinary Russians would still be hungry for details about how ordinary Americans eat and pay mortgages. But to Mr. Zlobin's surprise, his book - published this year and marketed as a guide to Russians considering a move abroad - is already in its fifth print run, and his publisher has commissioned a second volume. With the neutrality of a field anthropologist dispatched to suburbia, Mr. Zlobin scrutinizes the American practice of interrogating complete strangers about the details of their pregnancies; their weird habit of leaving their curtains open at night, when a Russian would immediately seal himself off from the prying eyes of his neighbors. Why Americans do not lie, for the most part. Why they cannot drink hard liquor. Why they love laws but disdain their leaders. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/world/europe/book-gives-russians-close-up-of-american-minutiae.html _______________________________________________ Please be sure to include a URL to the article. Reply to the sender with a "Thank you" if you like this post. _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
