August 21, 2020

I'm Not Dead Yet


I'm Not Dead Yet
No need to turn on the lights and siren, apparently. Zimin Vas, Wikimedia Commons

An elderly woman in the city of Kursk awoke after surgery not in a comfortable hospital bed, surrounded by friends and family, but in the hospital's morgue.

The woman was reportedly admitted to the hospital with abdominal pain. Doctors operated on her, but she did not respond to resuscitation and was declared dead after more than half an hour.

The next morning, a (we presume very startled) hospital employee found her awake in the morgue. The patient is now back under medical surveillance.

The regional health committee is now investigating the incident, declaring it "unacceptable." The hospital has defended itself by saying that it lacks expensive equipment to measure brain activity, and that the chief doctor was on vacation at the time.

Regardless, we think zombies, even elderly ones, are the last thing we need in 2020.

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Marooned in Moscow

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This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
The Frogs Who Begged for a Tsar (bilingual)

The Frogs Who Begged for a Tsar (bilingual)

The fables of Ivan Krylov are rich fonts of Russian cultural wisdom and experience – reading and understanding them is vital to grasping the Russian worldview. This new edition of 62 of Krylov’s tales presents them side-by-side in English and Russian. The wonderfully lyrical translations by Lydia Razran Stone are accompanied by original, whimsical color illustrations by Katya Korobkina.
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