Rating: 
Summary: Great read
Review: A former member of the US embassy staff in the old Soviet Union, Taplin is able to walk you through the booze fueled transistion from communism to democracy. It's not a blow by blow historical read but a time stamp of someone who was there when these events happened and chronicles the reactions of the average Yuri on the street to the countries tectonics. The title is a reference to the agreement (the Open Lands agreement) signed between the US and Russia that allowed each others citizens unimpeded access to the areas of the respective countries. When Nikita Kruschev came to America he was irate at not being allowed to visit LA. It was closed. With the new open lands agreement Taplin journeys to the previously unvisited (by Americans) towns of Russia. A great job.
Rating:
Summary: Great read
Review: A former member of the US embassy staff in the old Soviet Union, Taplin is able to walk you through the booze fueled transistion from communism to democracy. It's not a blow by blow historical read but a time stamp of someone who was there when these events happened and chronicles the reactions of the average Yuri on the street to the countries tectonics. The title is a reference to the agreement (the Open Lands agreement) signed between the US and Russia that allowed each others citizens unimpeded access to the areas of the respective countries. When Nikita Kruschev came to America he was irate at not being allowed to visit LA. It was closed. With the new open lands agreement Taplin journeys to the previously unvisited (by Americans) towns of Russia. A great job.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth a read - SLANTED, but worth a read
Review: A good effort, and most of it is interesting and entertaining. His description of the mood and conditions are quite accurate and illuminating. Which is the rub - his bias gives the book a feel of one written at the height of the Reagan era, and not by a typical American travelling Russia in the 90s. An 'Information Officer' in the U.S. embassy, son of a spook... 'nuff ced. His description of Russian trains clearly show he's NEVER ridden on Amtrak, and his condemnation of 'soulless monumental Stalinist architecture' makes me wonder WHERE in Washington D.C. he was living. The main annoyance with the book is his constant references to some mysterious pre-revolutionary golden age in Russia. Basically, he seems to feel that everything SINCE the Revolution was bad, and everything BEFORE automatically good (perhaps coming up with spin for the State Dept. has made it easy for him to ignore the pre-revolutionary 90% illiteracy, NO health care, serfdom, etc. - he doesn't seem to recall that the schoolkids he talks to wouldn't have BEEN schoolkids under old Nicky II). As I said, a good read, but it has a definite Reagan-era feel to it. A good companion to Jeffrey Tayler's OUTSTANDING 'Siberian Dawn', or Colin Thubron's "Lost Heart of Asia', and 'In Siberia'.
Rating:
Summary: Take me There!
Review: A keen reader of travelogues, I borrowed a copy of Taplin's book some years ago from the library and after reading it, I JUST HAD TO GET MY OWN!! I am often wary when picking up books written by Westerners on a country which is their traditional "nemesis", but Taplin does a great job in describing his journey through lesser-known parts of Russia. His writing is sensitive, but not over-sentimental. In addition to the many memorable people he meets on his journey, his book is filled with lovely black & white pictures at the beginning of each chapter, which allows us a tiny view into the areas he is describing before we finally get a chance to go there (can hardly wait!). A book about the new Russia, the hopes and strengths of her resilient people, "Open Lands" is engaging, moving and unforgettable. See you in Vladivostok! (*Still am surprised Singapore came up twice in the book!)
Rating:
Summary: A bitter-sweet look at the once hidden parts of Russia
Review: A wonderful traveler's tale to some of the once forbidden parts of Russia. Mixed in with the author's experiences are the histories of the places and their people. I found it very fascinating.
Rating: 
Summary: worth a read
Review: After Tayler's Siberian Dawn I really enjoyed Taplin's book. Some very interesting information about Siberia is contained in here and it is definitely worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: worth a read
Review: After Tayler's Siberian Dawn I really enjoyed Taplin's book. Some very interesting information about Siberia is contained in here and it is definitely worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Well-done indeed.
Review: As an American who has lived in Russia at various times over 4 decades, over 40 years, both under Communism and in the decade since the fall of the Communist regime, I can say "Open Lands" really resonates. The author has done an excellent job of conveying the feel of the place - the look, climate, atmosphere. Beyond that, he's done a very good job indeed weaving the larger political and historical context into the work, so that places are set in time and space. Beautifully written, sensitive, accurate, telling account with great eye for detail. Fascinating, and worth buying.
Rating:
Summary: Exploring the sticks of the "new" Russia.
Review: In 1992, The United States and Russia signed an accord allowing the citizens of each country the right to travel freely throughout the territory of the other, thus reversing years of Cold War policy that had closed off access to cities and immense tracts of land to the respective peregrinations of both "commie comrades" and "imperialist warmongers". In this book, Mark Taplin, an employee of unexplained duties who represents Washington's Foggy Bottom in Mother Russia, records his observations as he visits newly "Open Lands" at the far margins of his host country. Taplin is one of those intelligent, observant individuals who can write a travel monologue that is appealing to intelligent, curious readers that want more out of life than driving to Disney World in the family SUV. His honest, yet sympathetic, portrayal of post-Soviet Russia and the condition of its people in such places as Vorkuta (the former center of Uncle Joe's Gulag), Tannu Tuva (on the edge of Mongolia), and Vladivostok ("Lord of the East"), reveals much of what is wrong, and right, in today's Russian Federation. What is more, he provides histories of the regions in which he wanders, salt to the literary meal devoured by those of us who, though we may travel extensively, will likely never visit these corners of the earth. Finally, Taplin writes with a sense of humor, an indispensable character trait that served him especially well as he semi-surreptitiously makes his way to the interior of the Kamchatka Peninsula and an almost comic encounter with the Russian secret police. My only complaint, but one that prevents me from awarding 5 stars to this entertaining and informative volume, is the failure of the author to include the photos he says he took along the way. Instead, at the head of each chapter, we are offered a fuzzy, unenlightening, boring image created by some freelance photographer hack that adds virtually nothing to the text that follows. A significant, disappointing oversight!
Rating:
Summary: Russian Survival
Review: Mark Taplin is or at least was a U.S. Information Agency official stationed in the Soviet Union during the 1980s and later in non-Communist Russia during the 1990s. During his later tour of duty he visited several parts of Russia that had been previously off-limits to foreigners. In some cases the reasons for the prior exclusion are obvious from his telling-near sensitive military sites or gulags-but mostly they are not. The book's title comes from the "Open Lands" agreement signed by the United States and Russia in the early 1990s, which Taplin describes as allowing the citizens of either country to travel wherever they want in the other country. With the exceptions of Vladivostok and Arkhangelsk (Archangel), the locations Taplin chooses to visit and describe are not places familiar to many non-Russians. Yet each of the eight adventures has a unique and interesting story. Velikiy Ustyug highlights the suppression of religion during the Soviet era, and the loss of expertise in a specialized silver making craft. Vorkuta describes the remnants of gulag community that furnished the labor for a Siberian coal mining operation. Kabardino-Balkaria and Tuva cover ethnic clashes of non-Russian, non-Orthodox populations within the remaining Russian Federation. In addition to describing unusual places and populations, Taplin includes portraits of some very interesting people he met along the way, some of them shady, some of them defeated by life under the Soviet dictatorship, some of them outrageously exuberant and in tune with their changing surroundings. The book is well-written. I submit two thought-filled examples: "So it turned out that the noble primitivism we had imagined still flourished in the far reaches of the steppe was more our Rousseauist fantasy than Tuva's hinterland reality. Our hosts did not sit down around a campfire to offer up throat songs to the heavens, nor to wonder awestruck at the glow of the night sky, which in Tuva harbors more stars at midnight than many city dwellers see in a lifetime. No, a black and white television set was plugged into the car's cigarette lighter, and the natives gathered under the yurt's canvas to marvel at the world beyond the mountains. It twinkled with a peculiarly absorbing ingenuity, filling the screen with fin-de-siecle portent and pathos." (pp. 214-15). "There are many Russian proverbs, and this is another: 'Truth does not burn in fire, nor drown in water.' In every place I visited in Russia, memory had not given way to amnesia; rather, bald-faced lies had ceded their authority to a sometimes sad and somber reality. Falsehoods had proved no match, in the end, for the mighty labors of an architect in the tundra; an ethnographer in the Caucasus; a shaman in middle Asia; a tipsy museum guide in the taiga-and hundreds of thousands of unordinary people like them. The dislocations of Lenin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, Pol Pot's Kampuchea are far from gone, but the miraculous truth about truth can give us hope, can spare us from despair. From the Nizhny embankment, that much is clear." (p. 341). There is a slight ideological edge to Mark Taplin's storytelling, similar to that of Robert Kaplan though not as pronounced. Overall, the story is beautifully written and very nicely done.
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