Blue Skies is the wide-ranging story of an American's active life in many professions, places, and cultures over four score years. Embracing subjects as diverse as archaeology, jazz, Sovietology, local history, higher education, architecture, international politics, and Central Asia, it offers firsthand vignettes of prominent figures of those eras, including presidents. musicians, oligarchs, architects, and, yes, regular folks. Roaming from America and Europe to Russia and Central Asia, it recounts one man's life in the lingering world of the nineteenth century and amidst the tumultuous changes of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
