The author gained considerable experience of working in countries in the Soviet sphere in the 1980s-Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary-but this did little to prepare him for a long-term stint in Kazakhstan, commencing at the outset of 1993. If his eyes were opened wide in Belgrade, Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest, they were bug-eyed in Almaty, Kazakhstan. There he keenly experienced the harshness and wonders of post-Soviet Kazakhstan. The...