How do you get to one of the most remote places on earth, now that it's one of the lesser known countries within the USSR? Well, a lot of team effort and complexity. Finally, you'll explore the extremely remote area famous for its throat singing and unique culture.

Enjoy your new free book!

going into goaliegirl's travel narrative bookbox. Enjoy!

Since I had a stack of books from the late MaryZee which would go in the box, but none of my own (and a few I haven't read that I got out of the last round of the book box), I offered to let my fellow BCinDCers piggyback off my turn by pulling out a book if they were interested. We have done this in the past because ResQgeek in particular enjoys the genre. I am not surprised that this was his selection, because he is interested in Mr. Feynman. I will take this to the meet-up tomorrow for him.

This book is being passed along to ResQgeek from the Travel Narratives Book Box. I hope he enjoys the combination of Richard Feynman and impossible travel to a no-longer-extant country.

Any future reader or recipient of this book is encouraged to leave a journal entry here on the BookCrossing site to let prior readers know the fate of the book. You can make an anonymous entry without joining the BookCrossing movement, but if you are interested in joining, it is a free and spam-free community where your contact information is not shared with others. Best of all, members receive private messages via e-mail from books like this one when those books are journaled, allowing for long-term relationships between books and readers.

I received this from 6of8 at today's meetup. While I certainly don't have any shortage of books to read, I do enjoy travel narratives, and Richard Feynman is one of the most fascinating scientist of the last century, so I couldn't resist this book.

As a travel narrative, this is a bit of an unusual book, in that it is mostly about trying to get to a particular place, but doesn't really provide a narrative of actually traveling there. As with much else in Richard Feynman's life, this all began with a whimsical bit of silliness. Feynman knew of Tannu Tuva from his childhood stamp collecting, and used that trivia to stump his friend Ralph Leighton. In the process, he triggered a quest to visit this remote place, which was nominally independent only for a brief period in the first half of the twentieth century before it joined the Soviet Union (it is now part of the Russian Federation).

This is a bit of a time capsule, highlighting the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States during the 1980s. These relations form the backdrop to the story of the friends' efforts to travel to Tuva, and played a large role in the struggles they encountered. Not only is Tuva exceptionally remote (located between Siberia and Mongolia), but the Soviet red tape made travel there by outsiders exceedingly difficult.

While the efforts to reach Tuva mostly failed to come to fruition, the story of the effort highlights the personalities of those involved, and show how individuals can bridge cultural and political differences to form friendships. And that is perhaps the most inspiring part of this story...that ordinary people can reach across enormous barriers of distance and culture and find commonality with those on the other side.

This book will be shared at the monthly BC-in-DC meeting.

Picked this up at today's BCinDC meetup. Looks interesting, and Feynman is always a fascinating character.