There is a lot of information in this book! It took me so long to read because I kept getting lost. I finally bought the audiobook and gave it a go to finish the book. If you are looking for information about the topic this will certainly give it to you.

This was one of those books that you need to take some breaks on, and honestly, I didn't mind it. With going through and really diving into this, it was worth the read. I would be willing to read again, and to delve into other works as well.

Amazing nonfiction book! I was not familiar with this topic before going into this book so when I did read it it felt very easy to digest and understand the events and situations that occur though the book! This book went by really fast but was filled with such great information and a well rounded story! Getting to experience the trip George Kennan went on and what he saw on his journey was amazing and I loved getting to know more about a topic like the book discusses regarding the exile system during 1885! Definitely recommend reading this one if you are looking for a quick historical account that delves into a tolling but amazing journey taken!

This detailed account of George Kennan’s life and his epic journeys to Russia to uncover the exile system is certainly interesting. His determination and dedication to his task can’t fail to impress, especially when considering the difficult and dangerous conditions he faced. He travelled over 8,000 miles in his quest and his descriptions are as harrowing as we might expect from a country that has always routinely used exile and labour camps as punishment and the suppression of dissent. He met with convicts, exiles and those tasked with making the system work, then reported back to the US where he publicized his findings. Unfortunately I found the book rather repetitive – one more terrible journey, one more near-death experience, one more case of frost-bite, one more ruthless jailer. Nothing unexpected here. But someone had to have the grit to uncover the conditions and Kennan did this superbly well. The book is a worthy tribute to him, but didn’t engage me as much as I expected it to. Somehow he never quite came alive for me. Good as a chronicle but lacklustre as a biography.

This was so fascinating! If I had been asked, I would have said that the communists invented “exile to Siberia” with the Gulags, but the Tzars had been using the exile system to send criminals, political dissidents, or anyone they didn’t want around to mines and prisons in Siberia for over a century before the Russian revolution. And they were always absolutely terrible.
George Kennan was a 19th-century American journalist who toured Siberia and wrote and lectured about the miseries of exile. The American public, which had been quite pro-Russia, was horrified and Wallace argues that the seeds of US mistrust of Russia was born.
If you like history - I’d highly recommend this book: A story I knew nothing about, interesting writing, and (bonus!) it wasn't too long.

Thank you to and St Martin's Press and NetGalley for an advance copy of this e-book in exchange for honest review.

This was a really interesting book but I was a little disappointed in it as well.
There wasn't enough detail about the life of the exiles and I found the narrative to be repetitive in some areas, for example travel between locations and descriptions of the different prisons. I did put this book down several times to read something else and then returned later to continue reading.

Amazingly, at the time when this book depicts, the US and Russia had excellent diplomatic relations. that existed until George Kennan travels into Siberia and sees first hand the horrible treatment Russians were given by Russians. Most of these so called criminals were dissidents.

Kennan traveled by the only means available to him in those days, horse carriages, horseback or sleighs traveling through blizzards, and weather conditions that threatened his life daily. He found people working in mines, chained to wheelbarrows, women and children freezing to death, and torture and punishments that were harsh and cruel. During his eight thousand miles journey, he found people living or surviving in deplorable circumstances.

When he returned to the US, he describes his journey in a journal plus a lecture tour many years in duration. Many believe the cooling of the relationship between Russia and the US which continues to this day started with Kennan's exposure of the dire conditions existing in Siberia.

Thank you to Gregory J. Wallace, St Martin's Press, and NetGalley for a copy of this book which published in December of '23.

I didn't love this one but I also didn't hate this one. However I'm not sure how I feel about this one.

Excellent! This book is both a telling of the Siberian exile system and of George Kennan's journey through Siberia and his relations with Russia as an American. As an average reader and semi-Russophile, I've read an extensive amount of Russian classic literature as well as history and biographies. I've read the first 5 parts of The Gulag Archipelago. But the Siberia of this book was new to me! I had no idea it was so bad and so evil before the Gulags.

The narrative and writing were great. It's clear, concise, and is told in good order. I liked the details of Kennan's life and travels. There was a great balance of context and on-topic content.

I would recommend this for any reader who enjoys reading history, biographies, or about Russia or that time period specifically.

Thank you to St Martin's Press and Netgalley for an arc to read and voluntarily review. I'm coming to expect great nonfiction from SMP!

Over ten months Kennan traveled eight thousand miles, mostly in horse-drawn carriages, sleighs or on horseback. He endured suffocating sandstorms in the summer and blizzards in the winter. His interviews with convicts and political exiles revealed how Russia ran on the fuel of inflicted pain and fear. Prisoners in the mines were chained day and night to their wheelbarrows as punishment. Babies in exile parties froze to death in their mothers’ arms. Kennan came to call the exiles’ experience in Siberia a “perfect hell of misery.”

This book was so intense I couldn’t stop reading it. I enjoyed this book. The scene descriptions were so well laid out I could see where the author was describing, so much so that I felt I was right there with them. I liked the writing style and would read more books by this author. The flow of the book was very well laid out.

Nonfiction about an American journalist's fact-finding trip regarding Russia's system of exiling political prisoners to Siberia in the 1880s – or at least that's what the title suggests. The book itself ends up being more of a biography of the journalist, George Kennan; he doesn't even arrive in Russia until nearly halfway through the text. Which is theoretically fine, but I was here for deadly explorations of Arctic regions, and didn't care about his meaningful childhood nights spent in the woods or career as a telegraph engineer. So the first half was quite the trudge for me.

Once we finally get to Siberia, much of Wallance's text feels like a simple rewording of what Kennan himself wrote. I like reading popular historical nonfiction, and I've come across this problem frequently lately: when writing about a past journalist or diarist or other writer, the modern author just updates their language for the 21st century and ends their job there. No! Give me more! Give me other perspectives – what did Russians think about Kennan's trip? what conclusions have historians or other researchers come to about the exile system in the century-plus since Kennan's work? It just seems like Wallance didn't do any research outside of Kennan's own writings, and that's annoying. If that's all I wanted, I could have read Kennan myself.

It's a fascinating topic, but I feel like there's a broader, more in-depth coverage waiting to be written.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6164466568

A fascinating look into George Kennan’s trek into Siberia to look into the country’s exile system. Before his experience at Tomsk, a prison in Siberia, Kennan was prepared to write in defense of the system, but his mind was quickly changed.

He first entered the country in 1865 to help lay telegraph lines and experience adventure. His time there led to a book and he wrote about the exile system and how he thought it was good in that families were kept together instead of separated.

His tune changed in 1885 when he returned and experienced Tomsk first hand. He found it to be cruel, unsanitary, dangerous and corrupt. He wrote another book detailing his experiences and how his mind had been changed by his first hand experience.

A great nonfiction read for those interested in journalism, the power of observation and adventure.

This started out slow and then got excellent. The descriptions were outstanding and almost frighteningly immersive, and the mental journey Kennan himself went on was really powerful to witness. I loved the conclusion, which showed a connection between the older Kennan and his relative who would later take up the baton of working with Russia.

For those who love a grand adventure - this is it! Get lost in the vast wildernesses of Russia. Go through the bustling cities. This book is full of the good, the bad, and the ugly. The tiered system of the monarchy and subjects, and more are discussed throughout this book, while George Kennan continues the journey of a lifetime through the frozen tundras.

I absolutely could not put this book down. One of the top books of the year already!

An absolutely fascinating read about a person who changed history and relationships between countries during a time and about a place in history about which I knew little. It is not something normally addressed by modern non-Russian authors because of a lack of access or interest. I did not realize the Union’s only ally during the civil war was Russia. Western nations were more tied to the confederacy. Out of this grew a warm adoring relationship between our countries. Until, that is, a reporter between jobs who had previously travelled across Siberia returned intending to write a puff piece about the gulags and found them to be far from what he imagined. This is a brilliant, in depth study of the historical record of this time and the permanent change in our national perception of Russia and its system of justice.

This is such a fascinating read about the exile system of Siberia. I had no idea how crazy it really was.

I had never heard of George Keenan and couldn't imagine why ANYONE would want to march into Siberia willingly, so I knew I needed to read this book, and what a read this was.

George Keenan and Mr. Frost [his illustrator and photographer] went into Siberia [a trip of 8,000 miles that took 10 months by train, horseback and carriage rides] with the idealist notion that the exile system [that even Russians didn't deem horrible because "families were allowed to go to with the "criminals"] was the perfect way to rehabilitate criminals and due to the excellent relationship at that time between Russia and the USA, was going to write articles about that very thing. Of course, in reading this, one would think that George Keenan was the bad guy here, but as one reviewer put it, one of George Keenan's greatest accomplishments was his ability to change his mind, and change his mind he did. His interviews with convicts and political exiles revealed how Russia ran on the fuel of inflicted pain and fear and the more he saw, the more horrified he became and when he came home, he proceeded to let the world know just how awful it all was [leading to the start of the great rift between the US and Russia]. The story of how he started and where he ended up is very enlightening, brutal at times to read, bleak, and amazing, often all at once and I found myself NOT wanting to put the book down because I was so wrapped up in all of it.

Well-written and researched, this is a book well worth the read - if you love an adventure story with a "hero" that goes from naive to eyes wide open, this is the book for you. I highly recommend this.

Thank you to NetGalley, Gregory Wallance, and St. Marten's Press for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This non-fiction account of George Keenan's journey into Siberia to see Russia's exile system, expecting to find a better way to treat prisoners and political dissidents. But the subtitle is a huge clue as to what it really was - Epic Journey, Brutal, Frozen and I'd add horrible treatment of human beings by other human beings.

Keenan had been to Russia before with the American Telegraph Company, who was laying a telegraph line from the US, through Canada, through Russia-Alaska under the Bering Sea and into Siberia Russia - lofty goals! This was his second trip into Siberia and it was truly a brutal trip to travel in sub zero temperatures in the winter, sandstorms in the summer, no roads or good places to stop for their travel on horseback or by sleighs, and at best finding villages of poor peasants. The worst was seeing first hand the horrific treatment of the prisoners. Even family members who traveled to find their loved ones often became prisoners. There were certainly no human rights organizations to fight for these people.

An interesting period of time I had not read about before and although it is brutal and a bit depressing, it is good to bring this story to light again today given the focus on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and their value and respect of human lives isn't much better today.

My thanks to Net Galley and St. Martin's Press for an advanced copy of this e-book.

A deeply fascinating look at the relationship between the US and Russia, as well as some horrid human rights abuses, all through the lens of one man who actively sought to document these occurrences even at the cost of his own personal safety. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the free advance copy.