{"id":6618,"date":"2019-11-16T06:34:07","date_gmt":"2019-11-16T14:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=6618"},"modified":"2019-11-16T07:02:18","modified_gmt":"2019-11-16T15:02:18","slug":"book-review-berezina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2019\/11\/16\/book-review-berezina\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Berezina"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Berezina, by Sylvain Tesson. Save your money, folks. This one’s a snoozer.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Damn, it sounded good, and the book review I read last week in The Wall Street Journal<\/em> (which I must have read too quickly) made it sound like an interesting read.\u00a0 And the cover looked good, too.\u00a0 It had to be good: \u00a0 Five guys riding from Russia to France in the dead of winter, retracing Napolean’s retreat from a military disaster, on three Ural motorcycles.\u00a0 I love motorcycle adventure books.\u00a0 How could it not be great?<\/p>\n

Well, let me tell you how.\u00a0 Berezina is the name of a river Napolean crossed on the way back from Moscow in 1812, and in colloquial French it’s become a term for anything that’s a disaster. \u00a0 It’s an entirely appropriate title for this book.\u00a0 I was hoping for stories about riding in the cold, riding from Russia to France, the challenges in riding motorcycles not known for reliability…in general, a good adventure read.\u00a0 What I found was a lot of intellectual drivel laden with three-dollar words talking almost exclusively about Napolean and his retreat.\u00a0 Somehow, for the most part, the author managed to do this without describing the areas he rode through, and without hardly mentioning the bikes or the ride.\u00a0 He spent a lot of time imagining the misery experienced by Napolean, his army, and bizarrely, his horses.\u00a0 I would estimate that less than 5% of the book was about the riding.\u00a0 Getting through this story was a slog, even though the book was mercifully short.<\/p>\n

I realized all of the above in the first few pages, but I kept reading and hoping it would get better.\u00a0 It didn’t.\u00a0 Berezina<\/em> reminded me of another motorcycle adventure that was mostly about things other than motorcycle riding (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance<\/em>, which I also found to be a slog when I read it 50 years ago).\u00a0 Zen<\/em>, however, at least spent some time on the bike and the riding.\u00a0 In Berezina<\/em> there was precious little of that, and what little there was wasn’t nearly enough.\u00a0 Save your money, folks.\u00a0 The best thing about Berezina<\/em> was that it was only $15.<\/p>\n

There’s an old saying:\u00a0 You can’t tell a book by its cover.\u00a0 In this book’s case, never were truer words spoken.<\/p>\n

If you want a great read about a real motorcycle adventure, buy a copy of Riding the Edge<\/em>, Dave Barr’s epic story about his ride around the world on a constantly-failing Harley.\u00a0 If it has to be about riding Russia in the winter, try Riding the Ice<\/em>, Barr’s sequel about a trip across Siberia in a sidecar-equipped Sportster.\u00a0 Either of those books is a great read.\u00a0 Better yet, buy both books.\u00a0 You can thank me later.<\/p>\n

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More books? \u00a0 Hey, check out our Books<\/a> page!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Damn, it sounded good, and the book review I read last week in The Wall Street Journal (which I must have read too quickly) made it sound like an interesting read.\u00a0 And the cover looked good, too.\u00a0 It had to be good: \u00a0 Five guys riding from Russia to France in the dead of winter, … Continue reading “Book Review: Berezina”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[654,89],"tags":[942],"class_list":["post-6618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure-motorcycle-books","category-motorcycle-adventure-ride","tag-book-review"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6618"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6625,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6618\/revisions\/6625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}