Chinese Awakenings Book

If you were to go by the title and the summary on the back of the book, you would believe that you were getting this great long story about the four people who lived on an Arctic island for six years. Now that would have been a great book!

But what we get instead is the tale of Roberts' search for information about that tale of survival, which is something completely different. We hear about his exhausting search through libraries here and in Russia in minute detail. We get the run-down of every person he hires to help him with his search. Every hoop the Russian government makes him jump through.

It was kind of interesting to me anyway, because I would like to write a book so I paid attention to the process he went through. But I had thought this would be a good book for my father--NO WAY! He would have been bored to death by Roberts' literary exploits.

He does include as much of the story of the four men as he can figure out, which isn't all that much, and certainly not an entire novel-worth. But in the book he does detail how much money he spent researching the story so it isn't that surprising that he wrote this book anyway. So we learn about the islands area and surviving in the Arctic wilderness somewhat.

I just wish the title wasn't so misleading. It should be: "Searching For an Arctic Survival Story in Russia."