Sigrid RausingEverything is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia

With a few parts being of other times or places, this book is its author's account of the year, 1993, she spent in a village in newly post-Soviet Estonia to pursue fieldwork in anthropology. Although the book overlaps her doctoral thesis it is quite distinct from it. Some differences between Dr. Rausing's book and her thesis reflect the thesis (obtainable, single print by single print at one hundred and seventeen pounds a copy!, from the Oxford University Press) having been completed soon after 1993, and the book some twenty years later. Twenty years' passing brings changes in societies' norms and everybody's outlooks and, as Patrick Leigh Fermor's letting over forty years pass between his writing "A Time of Gifts" and his 1933 walk from the estuary of the Rhine to well on the way to that of the Danube similarly demonstrates: gifted writers' accounts of their times in places certainly away from home can, given adequate at-the-time and on-the-spot notes, gain from their having had chance to set youthful experiences in wider contexts--- whether having been a war time hero (as a soldier, Fermor fought behind the lines in Crete and while there captured a Wehrmacht general who was delivered to British intelligence officers in Egypt) OR becoming a very wealthy woman (in London only Buckingham Palace has a larger garden than the one Sigrid Rausing loves and she bought "Granta" to rejuvenate it and be a vehicle for her conception of what a literary magazine and press can do for humanity.)Dr. Rausing's book informs its readers about a variety of human existence few have borne and helps we who are so fortunately ignorant understand, probably as well as words on a page can, how villagers', once workers on a Collective Farm, gradually and haltingly emerged from the sheer deadening, drear, poverty of life in rural Estonia made harsher by the shadow and the substance of Soviet repression and violence. Because she found even post-Soviet rural Estonia difficult to live in, Dr. Rausing has been able to offer her readers links to the relatively minor problems she overcame and that they may face. Her book is usefully unsettling, often diverting, and consistently absorbing--- not least in its occasional contrasts, say, between villagers somehow not starving and the then Ms. Rausing luxuriating in a Viennese hotel: how varied is life, how adaptable people are!--- & Dr. Rausing writes well!

Arrived really quick, well worth the money, very interesting read and tells it how it is, good memories of Estonia

quite simply, one of the best descriptions and analyses of post-Soviet transitions. (Post Communist Eastern European transitiosn were a slightly different matter,) It is refreshingly free of the morbid nosalgia for the Soviet era which sometimes crops up in the of critical transitologists.The second part of the book is not as good as the first, but it remains an excellent book overall. Readers interested in a more academically structured book may still refer to her 2004 book on the very same Estonian collective farm.

very interesting book . Tells the story after becoming a free country and the remaining communist influence on the people

Excellent