A two-decade journey, panoramic in scope yet intimate in detail, through the hopes, sorrows, and conflagrations of an unraveled empire and the people living in it. "Eight Pieces of Empire" draws readers into the people, politics, and day-to-day life in the region, painting a vivid portrait of a tumultuous time. 320 pp.

Reviews

""Eight Pieces of Empire" is a unique, readable, and bracing work of eyewitness history by a brave foreign correspondent who risked his safety and more to document it."
-- "The New Republic" online
"Lawrence Sheets is a foreign correspondent whose bravery exceeds one's comprehension....he has produced some of the most gripping war correspondence I have ever read"
-"The Washington Times"
"[U]nforgettable memoir and travelogue of a period and a place most of us would prefer to forget.... give[s] meaning, and perspective, to the rocky transition of the past two decades, and infuses it with drama and despair.... vital and vivid"
-"The Boston Globe"
"His book is an invaluable eyewitness account of the traumas of the Soviet collapse told through the lives of those who were caught up in it and often buried under it. The book is written with a disarming honesty, sympathy and humility."
--"The Economist
"
"Lawrence Scott Sheets' "8 Pieces of Empire" is a vivid, largely anecdotal account of the chaos and confusion that has followed in the two decades since the fall of the massive communist entity that once obsessed America. It leaves the reader hungry for more."
"--Associated Press"
"Sheets' suite of incidents bespeaks his Russian-fluent immersion among people unmoored by the Soviet collapse, a quality watchers of the Russian scene will appreciate."
--"Booklist
"
"In an era when the media establishment supports foreign reporting less and less, Lawrence Sheets has lived a life of utter seriousness as a foreign correspondent: concentrating on one broad area--the former Soviet Union--in order to develop subject expertise, and then dedicating himself to indefatigable ground-level coverage of that area. Forget the pundits and the scandalmongers, this is a real journalist."
--Robert D. Kaplan, author of "Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power"
"Few Westerners understand the post-Soviet soul l