Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I am deeply indebted to Alice Truax, who does the equivalent of auto-body work on my writing, pounding every dented sentence to a high-gloss shine and replacing all the scratched and fogged glass of my arguments with breathtaking transparency. Kathleen Seidel has identified research errors and found the right answer to every query or uncertainty; she has combed through my prose with meticulous care and made it more lucid; she has organized footnotes, bibliography, website, and anything else that could possibly be organized. Writing is a crazy trapeze act, and she is my net. Thanks also to Jane McElhone for assistance on fact-checking.

I wrote portions of this book at Yaddo, where I write faster and more clearly than anywhere else, and I am profoundly grateful for my time there. I am particularly indebted to Yaddo’s enchanting president, Elaina Richardson, who adds a patina of joy to each of those productive visits.

I thank my colleagues at PEN, who have helped me to think more deeply about freedom and justice, in particular PEN’s remarkable executive director, Suzanne Nossel.

I thank Bonnie Burnham, Henry Ng, and George McNeely at the World Monuments Fund, who have been invaluable advisers time and again on far-flung corners of the world.

Christian Caryl has been something of a muse to me. He hosted me in Germany when I first began to write about Russia in the 1980s and the artists had started exhibiting in Berlin. I stayed with him when I went to Kazakhstan, and climbed mountains, both physical and ethnographic, in his company. I crashed with him and his family in Tokyo when he was living in Japan. He talked me into visiting Afghanistan when I was afraid to do so, and he made sure I had a place to stay and someone to guide me when I got there. Additionally, he read the manuscript of this book and provided invaluable feedback. Far and Away and my life would have looked very different without him.

I thank the people who appear within these various stories, too many to list again here: all those who allowed me to observe or interview them. Some of the people who helped me where I went or helped get me there deserve special acknowledgment: Beezy Bailey, Sara Barbieri, Janet Benshoof, Eliot Bikales, Bonnie Burnham, Mario Canivello, Hans van Dijk, Ashur Etwebi, Susannah Fiennes, Fred Frumberg, Maria Gheorghiu, Philip Gourevitch, Guo Feng, David Hecht, Harold Holzer, Roger James, Cheryl Johnson, Susan Kane, Aung Kyawmyint, Francesca Dal Lago, Lee Yulin, Elvira Lupsa, I Gede Marsaja, Joan B. Mirviss, Freda Murck, Henry Ng, Brent Olson, I Gede Primantara, Michaela Raab, Emily K. Rafferty, Jack Richard, Ira Sachs, Hélène Saivet, João Salles, Gh. Farouq Samim, Gabriel Sayad, Andreas Schmid, Lisa Schmitz, Jill Schuker, Luiz Schwarcz, Julie Krasnow Streiker, Andrea Sunder-Plassmann, Corina Şuteu, Dina Temple-Raston, Farley Tobin, Ko Winters, and Mauricio Zacharias.

I owe a debt also to my many companions in travel, among them Anne Applebaum, Jessica Beels, Chuck Burg, S. Talcott Camp, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Kathleen Gerard, Kathryn Greig, Han Feng, John Hart, Leslie Hawke, Cheryl Henson, Michael Lee, Sue Macartney-Snape, David Solomon, Claudia Swan, and, always most of all, my beloved Alexandra K. Munroe, who has joined me on continent after continent.

My thanks to Richard A. Friedman and Richard C. Friedman, who have kept me sane through experiences that often felt insane, and to Jon Walton for providing spiritual guidance when life seemed less than heavenly. Judy Gutow arranged the travel year in and year out, finding discounted fares and emergency hotel bookings in the most far-fetched destinations. I pay tribute to Danusia Trevino, who helps gracefully with so many thankless tasks and never grows impatient, and to Tatiana Martushev, who helped similarly in the earlier years of this project. Tremendous thanks to Celso, Miguela, and Olga Mancol, who have kept my household humming when I’ve been frantically writing and have coddled me when I’ve been too busy to coddle myself; to Sergio Avila, who gets me wherever I need to go; to Kylee Sallak and Ildikó Fülöp, who have brought both love and order to my son’s life and hence to mine.

I thank my mother, who encouraged me to be adventurous. She has been dead a quarter century, but she read and commented on the earlier work in this collection. She always wanted my writing to be clear; she always wanted it to be kind. Returning to that early work has reminded me of how she influenced everything that has come since. My father has slowly come around to the idea that I head off to places where he would never go and wishes I wouldn’t go, either. He is still my first and most loyal reader, and has been there with arms outstretched whenever I’ve flown too close to the sun. My thanks also to my stepmother, Sarah Billinghurst Solomon, who has been an unflagging supporter of this project.

I thank Tamara Ward and Laura Scher for always being in my corner, full of both love and fun.