Lawrence Scott Sheets

“To capture the human cost of fallen empire with all its horror and absurdity, Sheets offers the right combination: the political insight of a top reporter and the power of a novelist.”
― Martin Cruz Smith

“This may read like a mad journey through some of the most dangerous places on earth, but it is much more than that as well. Sheets witnessed most of the wars, disasters, and revolutions that followed the end of communism, and his accounts of them--from Chechnya to Chernobyl, and from Abkhazia to Afghanistan--serve as a passionate but considered obituary for the vanished Soviet empire.”
― Oliver Bullough, Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus

“War reporter Lawrence Sheets’s edgy memoir evokes exactly the fatalism, confusion, and centrifugal forces that suddenly broke up the Soviet Union two decades ago. Refreshingly free of faraway theorizing, this book focuses on what people actually saw and experienced in those years.”
― Hugh Pope, Dining with al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East

“Few Westerners understand the post-Soviet soul like Lawrence Sheets. Whether it is his hair-raising stories of the region’s myriad armed conflicts or the black humor with which he captures the moral and physical impoverishment of a collapsing empire, Sheets brilliantly condenses twenty tumultuous years into an eminently readable tale.”
― Matthew Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age