An interesting look at a middle-sized city in central Russia, near the border with Kazakstan. Garrels visited the city over several years for extended periods of time, made friends, got inside the society a bit. It is an interesting look at the lives, attitudes and perspectives of different kinds of people living in the city.
You get a sense of how life can be harsh there - the role of corruption, the power of money, the indifference of the State, families alone in a sea of opportunistic individualism. She gives you a sense of the blind spots, the places where ideas and reality don't match, where rhetoric wanders off from basic realities. It is interesting to see where nations' mythologies diverge from historical and actual reality - there is something tragic in the Greek sense lurking in these dark spots.
The city was one of the Soviet's centres of nuclear technology, and there are endless stories about pollution and contamination ignored, denied, hidden. It is still a very toxic environment.
The book reminds me of another social idea (wish I could remember the book). When a society experiences a prolonged period of oppression, exploitation and fundamentally dishonest leadership, social and moral bonds eventually break down, leaving everyone operating as an isolated agent. The example sighted in the source book is southern Italy and Sicily. This type of social structure is very persistent and rebuilding social trust and social morals seems to be next to impossible. Modern Russia as the result of a century of Soviet Communism and Putin's kleptocracy.
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