Memoirs of an American who spent the majority of over twenty years in Russia at the highest levels. Described by one literary critic as "Jack Kerouac narrating the adventures of Thomas Pynchon's character, Tyrone Slothrop, only in Russia," Sovok" takes you on a front-row view of the transition from Soviet Union to liberated Russia and her return back to today's tyranny. McKinney describes his interactions for over twenty years with dissidents, billionaires, mob bosses, presidents, bureaucrats, and political leaders, while he constantly breaks laws and bends rules, as mostly do the people he works with.
By declaring himself a liar, the author prods the reader to question everyone and everything. Through personal stories, one of Sovok's central themes is that a network of loyal and moral friends can circumvent the strictest government regulations and defeat criminal syndicates. Sovok falls into one or a dozen categories of book. The one category it is not is ordinary.
