Northwest of the World, first published in 1944, is the memoir of American explorer and fur-trader Olaf Swenson (1883-1938). The book chronicles his long career in Alaska and Siberia, and provides a fascinating look into the native culture of northeastern Siberia, as well as the difficulties - extreme cold, ships frozen in ice, nearly impossible travel conditions, and Soviet officials - faced by Swenson and his crews. Illustrated with 8 pages of photographs....

One of today's most intrepid writers chronicles a deadly trek through the legendary region that gave birth to the gulag and gave Siberia its outsize reputation for perilous isolation.--Publisher marketing.

Poland, 1940. The Russian army invades the beautiful city streets of Vilna. Soldiers storm ten-year-old Esther Rudomin's house and arrest her entire family. The Rudomins, the soldiers say, are "capitalists-enemies of the people." Forced from their home and friends, the Rudomins are herded onto crowded cattle cars. Their destination: the endless steppe of Siberia. For five years, Esther and her family live in exile, weeding potato fields and working...

In the late nineteenth century, close diplomatic relations existed between the United States and Russia. All that changed when George Kennan went to Siberia in 1885 to investigate the exile system, and his eyes were opened to the brutality Russia was wielding to suppress dissent. Over ten months, Kennan traveled eight thousand miles, mostly in horse-drawn carriages, in sleighs, or on horseback. He endured suffocating sandstorms and blinding blizzards....

This journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad takes the viewer from the palaces of St. Petersburg and the busy streets of Moscow to the vastness of Siberia with its jewel, Lake Baikal. Reach the Pacific at the port city of Vladivostok and then continue by air to the remote Kamchatka Peninsula.