SOURCE: Skube, Michael. “The Silence of Siberia.” Atlanta Journal Constitution (7 May 2000): L14.

In the following review, Skube offers a brief overview of Thubron's career and discusses In Siberia.

Washington

The image had haunted him, even as a schoolboy.

Pale green on the map that covered the classroom wall, distorted by Mercator's projection, Russia sprawled across 11 time zones and two continents.

“I'd been afraid of Russia ever since I could remember,” Colin Thubron wrote 20 years ago. “Where other nations—Japan, Brazil, India—clamored with imagined scents and colors, Russia gave out only silence.”

Nowhere was Russia more mysterious than in the emptiness known as Siberia. Taiga and tundra stretched for thousands of miles to the Pacific with only the barest hints of human habitation. It was Russia's Elsewhere, a void into which people vanished without a trace. Yet it was also a kind of spiritual preserve. Larger than the...