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Rating: 
Summary: A Saga of courage and perseverance
Review: I found the book most interesting especially because of the historical insights that the author shared about life in Russia, China and finally in Australia. The contrasts between life in the Far East and life now in Australia for Gary and his family is amazing and it is wonderful to note the appreciation he has for the differences.
I always love stories about people and what they have coped with in their lives. Certainly Gary Nash will have inherited some of the strong and stoic qualities that his grandmother showed.
I found the book very enjoyable to read and the family tree was very useful to continuously revert back to as the story progressed. It has also been written in a very positive way and I would guess that this is why the Tarasov family managed to get to Australia and be successful.
Most enjoyable - well worth reading!
Rating:
Summary: Survival and history
Review: The Tarasov Saga is a very absorbing book, not only because of its account of a remarkable journey over 25 years of the extended Tarasov family, initially fleeing from Russia through China and the Phillipines to Australia, but also for the historical perspective of life in Russia and China in the first half of the 20th century.
I have known the author, both as a work colleague and a friend for over 30 years but, Gary being a very private person, all I knew of his background was that he was of White Russian origin and had lived in China before coming to Australia! The to read this book and discover the astonishing story of all that happened from the time of the Russian Revolution and its effects on the Tarasovs, individually and collectively, until the first of them arrived in Australia in 1949, made for compelling reading.I am not qualified to comment on Gary's literary style or technique, but the way he has portrayed each member of the family, their strengths and their weaknesses brought them to life so that, not only were they believable, but one could visualise their individual contributions to this saga.
This book is about courage, determination and resilience, and what can be achieved by people who are single-minded and motivated to seek a better life after many years of deprivation
and hardship.
In particular, the reader is left in no doubt of the author's great affection and admiration for his Grandmother Aida and her monumental efforts to ensure that the family survived their epic journey and, bar one member, all be reunited in Australia.
I thoroughly commend this book which is not only an enjoyable read but in an age where the refugee problem is a world-wide one, provides an understanding of the hardships and traumas that constantly confront refugees on the move.
It is an intensely human story which reinforces basic values and beliefs, in an era where many consider these things to be unimportant.
It would be nice to think that an enterprising producer might think that there is enough meat and drama in The Tarasov Saga to provide the basis for a film or TV series. It certainly has all the ingredients.
Rating:
Summary: What a family!
Review: This book details the adventures of a large family as they seek safe haven from communism. In the beginning of the book, the author's mother and father are living in Czarist Russia, where his father is an officer in the army just prior to the outbreak of World War I. The small family grows to five children during the war. As the revolution begins to take hold, the father joins the loyalist White Russians and is dragged further and further east with them. His mother is left to manage alone with the five children. As it became clear that, as White Russians, they were not welcome in the Soviet Union, the mother decides to make her way east with the children, although she had no money and only a vague idea of where her husband might be. After a series of misadventures in which she is forced to leave the children behind, she eventually finds her husband and gets all five children back with her in a city in China that had a large Russian refugee population. The entire family made its home in China for the next twenty years, until a second communist revolution made them refugees once again. The story is quite well written, with amazing recall of details from long ago adventures. The stories describing everyday life in the Russian refugee communities of pre-Communist China provide a fascinating glimpse into a very little known way of life. On the one hand, it is amazing that the entire large family was able to make it out of Russia and then out of China, but on the other hand, it was precisely because they had so many people working together in the family that made it possible.
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