This book was originally intended to be a moderate revision and updating of a 1996 book, The Russian Far East: Forests, Biodiversity Hotspots, and Industrial Developments, which was co-authored by Josh Newell and Emma Wilson. But--as Newell notes in the introduction to the 2004 edition--the project kept expanding far beyond the boundaries of a few revisions. The resulting book, measuring 8-1/2 by 11 inches in size, contains 466 pages chock full of information of use to a wide range of people interested in the Russian Far East, from ecologists to economists, from geographers to geologists, from agronomists to anthropologists, from bankers to biologists.
The Russian Far East: A Reference Guide for Conservation and Development is organized into eleven chapters, the longest of which is the first chapter that presents an overview of the entire region. Subsequent chapters are devoted to the individual krais, oblasts, and okrugs that make up the Russian Far East, from Primorsky Krai in the south to Chukotsky Autonomous Okrug in the north--as well as the huge Republic of Sakha that covers the northwestern part of the region.
Each chapter begins with a summary of the characteristics of that particular political-administrative division, including its location, size, climate, flora and fauna, largest cities, population, political status, natural resources, main industries, infrastructure, foreign trade, economic importance, and general outlook for the future. This information is followed by longer essays--written by a number of different authors--on such topics as ecology, biodiversity hotspots, the economy, sustainable development, legal issues, and indigenous peoples.
A real strength of this book is that individual sections and essays were written by more than 90 specialists from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The resulting reference guide represents several years of research by a wide range of experts on the Russian Far East. Hence this is a highly useful resource not only for scholars and academics, but also for people working for the media, international businesses, governmental agencies, and NGOs.
As a culinary researcher writing about the foods of the Russian Far East, I was particularly pleased that all the flora and fauna described in this book are also listed with their Latin names, which makes it much easier for researchers to distinguish among specific kinds of salmon, crabs, mushrooms, nuts, and other indigenous foodstuffs of the Russian Far East. Economists and business people will find similarly useful information on such topics as foreign direct investment in the Russian Far East, activities of development banks in the region, and legal issues affecting future economic development. And ecologists will find a wealth of information on ecological issues, from the protection of forests, wetlands, and grasslands to the fight for survival of the rare Amur (Siberian) tiger, the Far Eastern leopard, and other endangered plant and animal species.
The authors of individual sections also do an admirable job of maintaining a balance between official Russian statistics quoted in some of those sections and figures likely to be more accurate. They recognize that such factors as "widespread corruption" often distort official statistics, as does intentional misinformation by public and private sources following their own particular agendas.
Not only is this book fascinating to read, it is also very well designed to display massive amounts of diverse information in ways that make that information easily accessible to the reader. More than 50 maps, some of them in color, provide excellent cartographic references for the topics covered in the text. Eighty clearly drawn charts, graphs, and tables present statistical and comparative data related to the individual essays in the book. Specific information is visually highlighted in sidebars that set it apart from the main text. And numerous photographs, in both color and black-and-white, give the reader a sense of the land and people, plants and animals, that make up the Russian Far East.
Josh Newell was well qualified for the task of writing this book, having spent more than a decade working in the Russian Far East, Siberia, Japan, and other northern Pacific Rim countries. He is currently a doctoral student in geography at the University of Washington. But few graduate students can count a book of this quality among their pre-doctoral credentials. Given his publication record, I hope we can expect more works of this merit to be produced by Newell in the future.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Russian Far East. When I was working in that part of Russia myself, prior to the publication of both of Newell's books, I would have benefited very much by having such references as a resource. And even five, ten, or twenty years from now, when the information in this book becomes dated, it will still be a valuable document of a particular time and place, during a crucial period in the history and development of the Russian Far East.