Anna Reid
Borderlands
Veiled and Unveiled in Chechnya and Daghestan
By Iwona Kaliszewska & Maciej Falkowski (Translated by Arthur Barys)
Hurst 179pp £25 order from our bookshop
I first came across Daghestan, a mountainous semi-autonomous republic of Russia at the eastern end of the Caucasus, in a Soviet-era encyclopaedia of national minorities. The Daghestanis, the entry said, had over fifty different languages, which in one valley were specific to the sexes, so that men and women could not communicate. Their chief industry was ‘the knitting of patterned socks’. I promised myself I’d go there one day, but never have. This lively and informative book tells me what I’ve been missing.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
This 'jaunty narrative raises fundamental questions about the role of popular history. Should this just be a matter of telling tales, as the general public often seems to think?'
@DrLRoach weighs up Charles Spencer's account of the White Ship Disaster.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/wholl-take-the-helm
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3