Archive - August 24, 2020

  Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl By Jonathan Slaght (Russia 1999—02) Ferrar, Straus and Giroux August 2020 358 pages $28.00 (Hardcover)   Reviewed by Fuller Torrey, MD (Staff/Ethiopia 1964-66) For those of us whose Peace Corps experience involved villages in countries such as Bolivia, Ethiopia, India and Thailand, placing Peace Corps volunteers in Russia seems like a disconnect. But indeed between 1992 and 2003 722 Peace Corps volunteers served there, including Jonathan Slaght, the author of this most interesting book. He spent three years in Russia’s Far East, 4,000 miles from Moscow in remote villages, a full day’s drive north of Vladivostok. In fact, he was among the last volunteers to leave when Russia kicked the Peace Corps out after accusing it of using volunteers as spies. The only disappointing thing about this book is that the author writes almost . . .