UB03: A Season in Outer Mongolia

Book Description
UB03 paints realistic portrait in words and photographs of Ulaanbaatar and rural Mongolia (including the Gobi) during the author's Fulbright year of 2003. Pichaske meditates on trash and the Black Market, on opera singers and morin khuur concerts, on dogs and fences and slum districts and nomadic life in one of the harshest landscapes on the planet. His photos are rarely picturesque or touristy: he gives us instead stairs leading to nowhere, bags of groceries hanging outside of dormitory windows, dogs snoozing in the sun, MonRonald's Restaurant and Life Kife Bar & Pub, a section of paving stones mosaiced around the root of a tree, a herder on horseback pointing directions in the vast Gobi emptiness.

About the Author
David Pichaske, professor of English at Southwest Minnesota State University, is a three-time Fulbright recipient (Poland, Latvia, Mongolia) and prolific author. His other books include Beowulf to Beatles, A Generation in Motion, Late Harvest, and Poland in Transition.


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Pichaske (Poland in Transition; Southwest Minnesota: The Land and the People) is a three-time Fulbright teacher of English, most recently in Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. A composite of diarylike entries, fragments, personal asides, and rants against the war in Iraq, this account was written four months into his stay (and, interestingly enough, printed in Mongolia). Although rather disparate and disparaging, it provides some interesting vignettes about everyday life in a country we know little about and the frustrations American teachers can find for themselves when far from home. It also contains provocative and sharply reproduced color photographs. Yet, this book is essentially a long email to friends, in need of editing and focus. Thus it will have limited appeal in most libraries.-Harold M. Otness, formerly of Southern Oregon Univ. Lib., Ashland Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.


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