Russian Light

Résumé du livre

Born of Russian �migr� parents in Harbin, Manchuria, Anthony Austin grew up in Shanghai, then consisting of an International Settlement and French Concession, pieces of China under colonial foreign rule. Graduating from an American missionary grammar school and a British high school he worked as a reporter on the local English language newspapers. After World War II he covered the Chinese civil war from Peking, as it was then known, for the United Press. Immigrating to the United States, he reported from Washington, D.C. for the UP, subsequently the United Press International. There followed a stint in Moscow for the UPI and two years in Paris, where he was taken on by the New York Times as a writer for the paper's News of the Week in Review.In 1979 the New York Times sent him back to Moscow. Fluent as he was in Russian, he was able to report intimately on the Soviet Union's beleaguered dissident movement; the writer Lev Kopelev was the model for Ivan Stashko in this book. Back in New York, he was senior editor on the Times Magazine until his retirement in 1985.Along the way, Mr. Austin wrote a book, The President's War, which exposed the deceit that smoothed the country's slide into the Vietnam War and earned him an Overseas Press Club prize. He translated three books from the Russian and wrote many book reviews. He retired in 1985 as senior editor of The New York Times Magazine and has been writing novels ever since.