Hey,what can I say... The author just genius... Can only suggest spend the money and enjoy!

That was the most honest book I have read in the last ten years.

It shows much realizm of life in America even twenty years after it was first written.

This is an account of Limonov's adolescence in Kharkov, a provincial Soviet city, in the years after Stalin's death. But Limonov's hero Eddie-Baby is nothing at all like the Russian heroes English-speaking readers have come to expect and his Kharkov is nothing at all like the tightly-policed USSR we usually encounte in emigre novels. In Eddie Baby's Kharkov, there is no law. Police are goons, and the quickest way to become a legend in the housing projects of Saltovka is to beat up a cop. Eddie-Baby is a nearsighted brain who decides, at the age of eleven, to become a hooligan--and does so with the same quiet, scary determination which once led him to fill notebooks with data on the fauna of the tropics. He devotes himself to learning the rules of his punk/proletarian world with a slightly crazed pedantry, and takes the reader along with him through one holiday weekend in this astounding, completely unknown habitat: the steel jungles of the Soviet nine-floor housing projects.

But the book is by no means gritty or grimy, or any of those silly words reviewers use to describe urban descriptions. In Eddie-Baby's mind, his world is a forest, full of ogres and prey--and all of it is worthy of caressing, precise description. He makes you love this world. There are paragraphs in this book I've read something like ten thousand times, they are so perfect. A middleaged lecher pouring a glass of vodka; a gang beating a pedestrian to death; a precise account of the sort of glue and paper you need to break a window quietly for a burglary; Limonov invests every one of these moments from a vanished, outlandish world with a calm and uncanny beauty. Get this book at any cost. There is nothing like it in the world.

This is a classic piece of Russian fiction that shows a darker side of Kruschev's Russia than is generally available. This is a definitive timepiece; what's most striking in it's depiction of Russian life are the parrallels with society in modern America.

I don't know how appropriate it is to judge this book as a whole when the authors have decided to each write about half the chapters and both have wildly divergent styles. Taibbi is a fairly polished journalist and his chapters focus on Russian life and scandal that has been ignored by the mainstream press. His writing is focused and funny and - after reading the chapter titled "hacks" - I doubt I will ever be able to unquestioningly read another Russian news story written by a Western journalist. For his chapters, it seems Ames has decided to rewrite and repackage his journal entries and makes the common mistake believing his life is interesting for his readers. Thus we get to hear all about his scabies, the girls he's slept with, the speed he does, his fights with his stepfather over wanting to borrow the car (for all his attempts to distance himself from all things American he sounds remarkably like a typical suburban teenager - the kind who dresses in black and sits inside writing bad poetry all day), it's all unforgivably boring. Some of his Exile columns have been reprinted in this book, but after a while they became so redundant that I stopped reading them. Ames claims his chapters were written while he was on speed - it's obvious. He rambles, repeats himself and writes with all the continuity of, well, someone on speed. Perhaps his other Exile columns are more interesting, but for someone approaching 40, you'd think he'd be a little more polished. Ultimately, as Taibbi himself points out, the appeal of the Exile is its mix of serious journalism/criticism and it's stubborn refusal to censor itself, but for a full length book there probably should have been more thought put into it. Final rating: Ames written chapters = *; Taibbi written chapters = ****.

Although I agree with one of the reviewers here in that Taibbi and Ames differ in the style of writing, I don't think that Ames's writing is in any way inferior to Taibbi's.

Taibbi tends to cover more "serious" topics in the book - things like corruption, crime and the hypocrisy of the governments involved in many "economic assistance programs" of the 1990's, while Ames gives us a more "personal" take on the whole thing, focusing more on the storyline (the creation of eXile), as well as "sex and drugs" promised in the title. Ames's style in this book is somewhat close to Edward Limonov's "It's Me Eddie" and, for the right reader, will definitely be a more entertaining and personal read. I found myself laughing more while reading Mark's chapters.

Since both of these "perspectives" are packaged in the same volume, you'll know pretty much everything you need to know about modern Russia after reading it.

I never write reviews of books but this one deserves it after all the middlebrows have come out to attack it lately (first reviews were all glowing, later reviews all horrified). It's always a sign of a great book and courageous author (or authors in this case) when you have people either loving or hating a book, as they do this one. These days journalists and academics are all looking like Eddie Bauer catalogue models, and trying to live those safe lives. That's probably why some people hate this book, in which the authors/journalists get into the filth of corrupt Russia and corrupt journalism and don't try to make themselves out to be decent regular fellas but rather tell it like it is. Not for the faint-of-heart... If your idea of courageous intellectual pursuit is proving that Satan doesn't exist or that we live in a world where everyone respects each other, stay away from The Exile. If you want to read journalism as it should be done, diving head-first into the filth in order to get closer to the truth (like Dostoevsky taught), then take a chance. I know more than a few aspiring journalists and writers who said that this book changed their lives. Ok, most were male, but males have rights too!