The Apartment: A Century of Russian History Hardcover – Illustrated, November 5, 2019

This book is a delight to read. The illustrations and text are creative and engaging. The longitudinal and multigenerational story is very well-done and easy to follow. I’ll enjoy sharing this book with my children, but I absolutely bought it just for me!

....and there are also some nice photos. It's a real pleasure looking at every page!

Wonderful book which is full of history but makes its interesting stories with great illustration. In 1975 i lived in such apartment among four other families with one kitchen and one bathroom. Gossips and no privacy.

Perfect illustrations. Very interesting read about the rise and fall of communism and communal housing in Russia. This is the perfect way to educate yourself and young people about what communal housing is really like.

A beautiful book.

We had the opportunity to visit such an apartment in St. Petersburg the summer of 2019, and we saw how it must have been for these families. It was fascinating to read and see how it all came about.

I like to browse on book pages and find a lot of small thinks! Thx

Admittedly, my choice to read this on a flight wasn't the best decision. The book is extremely large, with type scattered all over the place in no consistent order, so the reading experience was awkward. I feel like young readers would also struggle with the extremely large number of characters that show up in the book, many of whom are distantly related. I suspect children would struggle to keep up with all of the details and focalize on the complex and interested scenes created by the artist.I did generally find the tone and demeanor of the book to be a great match for young readers. The violence and despair that shows up as a recurring motif in Russia's history is treated with appropriate empathy and caution. This book would definitely leave readers with a balanced perspective on the Russian state and tends to evoke an interest in Russian culture and the Russian people, without leading the reader towards or away from the communist ideology that Americans tend to assume is at the core of any presentation of Russia. We are shown communism as a social phenomenon within the country during this century, but it's never presented in a way that asks children to consider how they feel about the appropriate size and scope of state power.