An untold chapter of America's past, a fascinating insight into a centuries-old love story, Glorious Misadventures is an expansive history of Russian colonisation from Guardian Award-shortlisted author Owen Matthews
Owen Matthews was born in London and spent part of his childhood in America. He studied Modern History at Oxford University before beginning his career as a journalist in Bosnia. In 1995 he accepted a job at The Moscow Times, a daily English-language newspaper. He also freelanced for a number of publications including The Times, the Spectator and the Independent. In 1997, he became a correspondent at Newsweek magazine in Moscow where he covered the second Chechen war, as well as politics and society. Owen was also one of the first journalists to witness the start of the US bombing in the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan, 2001, and went on to cover the invasion of Iraq, 2003. His first book on Russian history, Stalin's Children, was published to great critical acclaim in 2008. Owen is currently Newsweek magazine's bureau chief in Moscow, where he lives with his wife and two children.
Richly rewarding and hugely enjoyable, Glorious Misadventures is a
flamboyant history of sea-faring adventures, imperial encounters,
missed opportunities and lost loves which takes the reader back to
that long forgotten age when the Russians and the Spanish were the
masters of the wilderness between Alaska and California
*Orlando Figes*
A thrilling story of swashbuckling adventure and flamboyant
derring-do about a neglected but intriguing episode of
Russian-American history, Owen Matthews chronicles the shambolic,
often-forgotten and short-lived Russian empire in America,
combining fresh research with a compelling narrative
*Simon Sebag Montefiore*
Rezanov is the central character in Owen Matthews’s enthralling
account of Russia’s great misfire: its attempt to colonise America.
Many know that Russia sold Alaska to America, rather cheaply in
1867, fearing that it had become indefensible. But few know how it
had become Russian in the first place ... Glorious Misadventures is
in part this extraordinary man’s biography ... His voyage to the
Pacific, with shipmates even more mercurial, reads like an
implausibly lively historical novel ... The exotic personalities
and adventures come against a backdrop of geopolitical tussles
between France, Spain, Russia and Britain. Mr Matthews depicts them
neatly, and paints enjoyable cameos ... The book bursts with
telling details, many of them gruesome ... [An] exemplary account
of adventures that could have changed the world
*Economist*
His impressive research has yielded not only a rollicking tale of
derring-do, patriotism, endurance, low cunning and occasional
bravery, but is a devastating indictment of why Russians made such
hopeless colonists … Matthews’s vivid and hilarious account
illustrated by sketches by the ship’s cultured doctor and
naturalist, leads up to the final disaster … As with everything
else in this enthralling account, Russia lost out through bad
timing and bad judgment
*The Times*
The brutality and folly of Russia’s bid to conquer America has the
makings of grand tragicomedy … This is a book that starts in pretty
high gear. The human detail is compelling, the geopolitics well
outlined, the brutality and folly … Tragicomic. At its centre
Rezanov … Is an engaging antihero. Where it really hits its stride
is with the story of Rezanov’s hopeless mission to Japan … But this
story is more than just an aggregate of quirky, funny details.
Matthews has an excellent quick sense of the absurd, and his
footnotes are great … But he also manages to spin his analysis into
an aphoristic style that’s fresh and penetrating without seeming
glib … Creeping underneath the historical narrative, too, is a sort
of covert travel book. Matthews has been to these places, and gets
over a wonderful and personal sense of what Northern Mongolia … Or
Spruce Island … Are like now, and might have been like then.
Really, this is a blindingly good story extremely well told. Go,
read. It will make you laugh, stretch your eyes and give thanks
that you don’t live in anything remotely resembling late
18th-century Siberia
*Sam Leith, Spectator*
A moving account of his Russian family’s travails in the Soviet
Union … Intriguing … Where his book does grip is in its background
story of Russia’s eastward expansion, driven by its hunger for furs
… Matthews has travelled many of the routes these often desperate
men took, and his descriptions of them, and of the vast,
inhospitable wildernesses through which they travelled, are
compelling
*Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times*
A swashbuckling Tsarist Russian in America … Told by Matthews, the
story loses none of its strangeness and its swashbuckling verve,
reading at times like a cross between Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
and Gogol’s the Government Inspector
*Financial Times*
The story of the expedition and of how close Russia came to
extending its American colonies south to the Mexican border are the
subjects of this rich, fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable
book
*Anna Reid, Literary Review*
Mr Matthews doesn’t need success stories or heroes to shine his
entertaining light on this dark and hidden corner of history: his
gift for storytelling does that alone
*Country Life*
A fascinating byroad of history ... A breathlessly rip-roaring
tale
*Metro*
Owen Matthews relates the story of the courtier Nikolai Rezanov’s
attempts to settle America for Russia. And, were it not for the
author’s painstaking research and copious footnotes, Rezanov’s life
would read like an outrageous ripping yarn ... Matthews has an
engaging style which makes the complexities of Russian politics
less taxing than they might otherwise be. He has travelled to many
of the places Rezanov knew and there is a strong thread of
travelogue woven into the biography. His finely-tuned sense of the
absurd is brought to the fore in the episode where Rezanov is sent
by the Tsar to Japan as an emissary ... Rezanov is an astonishing
character: his swashbuckling charisma and ambition far outpaced his
abilities as a courtier, but he is captivating in both in his
triumphs and tragedies. Matthew’s footnotes, full of fascinating
details, also display his wry humour. He has penned a compelling
tale with a flawed hero whose story deserves to be better known,
and he more than does his flamboyant subject justice
*Independent on Sunday*
Generous with eloquent detail ... the facts, as Owen Matthews
renders them, are amazing
*Times Literary Supplement*
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