PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksSvetlana Alexievich’s...Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, now available in Bela Shayevich’s wonderfully readable English translation, offers sobering insights into the lives of ordinary Russians over the course of the last quarter century ... Some of the speakers in Secondhand Time tell long, complex life stories that take up full chapters. Others are integrated into a crowd of seemingly irreconcilable salvaged voices ... Secondhand Time is arguably the most personal of Alexievich’s books. After all, she, who experienced perestroika as an adult, ends these interviews in 2012, when \'tens of thousands of people are once again taking to the streets,\' and despite her disdain for the barricades, she makes clear: \'I’m with them.\' ... To be sure, much of Secondhand Time comes closer to poetry than documentary journalism...But Alexievich readily acknowledges her form’s potential shortcomings: the carefully curated interviews can contain more feeling and fabrication than fact ... Ultimately, Secondhand Time is not only about the changes that accompanied the Yeltsin revolution in 1991. It is about the irreconcilable clash between of the daily, lived experience of human beings and the ideological \'Great Ideas\' that fuel revolutions.
