Russian Blood is a splendid achievement. Butterflies, artists, and great estates illuminate its pages like icons drawn in medieval psalters. The book almost urges the reader to explore his past. Therein, Shoumatoff demonstrates, one can find a shape appropriate to his life with a structure more substantial than the pop psychology and sociology advocated by mobile, disembodied thinkers. Ours is an age besotted with the desire for answers.
Truth is simple, but no moral system is ever complex enough.
Instead of acknowledging the gap between truth and moral and political systems, people embrace platitude and slogan, statements describing general experience in so artless a fashion that they appear profound. The good traveler and thinker separates himself from system and develops both the strength to resist easy answers and the capacity to cope with the unanswerable. Eddy Harris is a thoughtful traveler. A black American who spends a year traveling Africa, Harris resists the urge to declaim. Africa's problems are many and complicated.