Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
by Svetlana Alexievich
The Nobel prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time offers a polyphonic requiem to the Soviet Union – and the way of life and culture that went with it – formed up of the oral accounts of those who lived through it.
Recommendations from our site
“The power comes from the stories themselves, the people she found and talked to.” Read more...
Stephanie Flanders, Economist
Why put Nobel prize-winning Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time on a list of the best Moon landing books? Because the Soviet achievements in space were such an important driver of the Apollo programme. This book is not about the Soviet space programme per se, but Alexievich’s description of how the Soviet people reacted when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space is one of the most unforgettable passages of nonfiction writing we’ve read.
