Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana

Some of Griest's experiences resonated with me, like the challenges of settling into life in a foreign city. Although I have never traveled through China or Russia, her amazing gift for story-telling made the places and people in her book seem surprisingly familiar.

I highly recommend "Around the Bloc"!!! And I can't wait to see where she travels to next!


A "coming of age story" sounds just way too cliched for this hombre...lo siento...   November 19, 2006
Adam Mezei (Prague, Czech Republic)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful


Ay, caramba!

AROUND THE BLOC is more than a coming of age story, dear Readers.

The following is a laundry list of what you're genuinely missing when you ascribe such facile titles to this amazing little read:

1) The wonderful (and many) impactful lines of prose that emanate from the pen of someone so young, yet with so much on the ball (at the time of writing, that is -- the "young" part, not the "on the ball" part). Griest is possessed of an awareness that few individuals of mixed ethnicity and/or race choose to properly acknowledge. Inside the pages of this book, Elizondo Griest attacks this concept with a doggedness and reckless deliberation that's so downright inspirational! I would like to travel in her wake.

2) There were several passages which I came across where I just had to place the book down beside me to take a deep "resetting" breath. How author managed to touch so many sensitive chords within me, I'm positive the effect was similar on the others. Ms. Elizondo Griest doesn't hold punches. When she refers to things like love, lust, heartbreak, depression, devastation, and sex, she does **precisely** that. When Griest refers to how pained she was when the man who meant everything in her life dropped her for the second time (in as many chances), you hurt right along there with her. If you don't, you don't have much of a emotional bone within your body. Someone so outspoken and delightful doesn't deserve to get hurt like that. At least this was my initial reaction.

3) This is a young woman who has criss-crossed the world and back again, all in an attempt to seek the answers for the most essential life-donning questions which those of us who take such things for granted are never inclined to ask. Essential burning questions of indentity. Of the need and desire to understand who she really is at her core--not as a by-product of some consumerist collective--or where she really came from. By dipping into the collective unconsciousness of several nations of which she herself wasn't a descendant (Russia, China)...then beginning to relate these lessons to the things she knew and loved about herself (which came about more in Havana). Just gorgeous. In several spots the narrative, the author delivered up this story with a dramatist's expert flourish.

~~~~

The pages just turned. I never **once** felt a need to stop reading (the only time I had was because I'd been interupted by something other than the read).

Intentionally, I believe, Griest constructs the narrative with a rising crescendo. The story commences in Moscow, Russia and moves through Beijing, China. As the journey concludes in Havana, Cuba, in a country closest to her US home, Stephanie comes face to face with a daemon which has been dogging her for most of her early adult life.

When she least expects to find the answer which has been plaguing her mercilessly, as she describes it, it confronts her hard. It hammers her when she finds herself doing an activity which one might consider enough to pull her thoughts away from such critical existential questions. Dancing the rhumba, or talking with a couple of Cuban college students on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean.

Rather than writing AROUND THE BLOC and ending things with a question mark, Elizondo Griest is even more convinced by the book's end about the righteousness of her choice of having travelled around the entire world, steadfast in her desire to want to know more about her essential self.

Like a highly sympathetic character in a novel or a film, you really want this person to succeed--dareisay win (?)--because the righteousness of her mission is just so important. It becomes as important to you as it initially is to Stephanie.

Haven't we all had such dilemmas in our life?

In this age of mixed identities, to be able to claim a purity of a connection to one's ancient or not-so-ancient culture is indeed a complicated decision, rife with paradoxes.

Even those who are "so-and-so"--how much of that "so-and-so" can they really be in the face of an environment which pulls them into defining themselves as something much more general than merely the binding specificity of one particular race or (former?) nation-state?

There are so many things which lay claim to our selves, at our cores. Griest cannot be blamed for having been sucked into this simplifying evening-out vortex, too. So deep has she been submerged into the commonality of the "Western experience," that it has become a compelling struggle to pull herself out. Like it is for others in her situation, who have written about things similarly.

It has been an honour and a privilege to follow her along her path. I can't thank her enough for having made me a part.

It's been to a gift to witness the changes, as she wrote about them, and as the book appears to be the culmination of many months and years of introspection and sometimes piercing self-doubt.

I've cherished each and every one of these pages. Thank you Stephanie.

If there ever were a sixth Amazonian star, it would go to Stephanie Elizondo Griest.

--ADM in Prague


Travel by book   May 2, 2004
pinkie (Houston, TX United States)
8 out of 10 found this review helpful

As someone who has always planned/thought/meant to travel and have lots of adventures of my own (but never actually had the means or time to travel), I can really appreciate all the detail and descriptions in Ms. Griest's Around the Bloc. I may not always agree with her conclusions, but I actually am grateful for them. I would so much rather hear opinions that cause me to think than feel affirmed or bored. It is almost as if she is an incredible, funny, and lively travel companion throughout this journey around the "Communist Bloc" and I get to hear her end-of-the-day assessment of her adventures and then begin to form my own. Her openness throughout the book about her experiences and mistakes help to endear and make her experiences much more "real" than a flat newspaper-style book. I have learned SO MUCH from this book about places that I will likely never visit and very much enjoyed having my eyes open to new perspectives on some very old issues.


everything I have been wanting to say   August 22, 2005
M. Dobbins (Durham , NC)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful

I lived in Asia (China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea) for the past 8 years as an American Elementary School Teacher. Around the Bloc is the most accurate attempt at explaining the emotion, trails, adventures, and growth that expats go through living overseas I have yet to find. I would highly recommend this book as "a coming of age book" along with those of Tania Aebi's and Jamie Zeppa. I didn't always agree with Stephanie Elizondo Griest's polictics or the conclusions that she came through, however I admire her for asking the questions and digging through the difficult that most expats ignore. It is a lot easier to travel and only see the glossy, simple face that these countries provide. It takes a lot of guts to really want to know the truth. This book is about the truth of China, Russia and Cuba. In addition, most travelogs are not very well written, this is a fine exception to that rule.