Our Man in the Crimea: Commander Hugo Koehler and the Russian Civil War

Koehler, "a very dapper and dashing individual, quite a lady's man" packed a good deal of excitement into a short couple of decades. A U.S. naval officer, he witnessed or participated in many of the major upheavals of the early years of this century: revolutionary China, defeated Germany, revolutionary Russia, re-created Poland. Mixing easily with all social classes (and particularly enjoying the British aristocracy), his observations offer a sharp, often acute photograph of a world in turmoil. His reports on the Russian Civil War make particularly interesting reading. Several of his judgments on Russia and the Russians seem startingly prescient today. After 1929, he subsided into a more passive life, though he did pull off an interview with Stalin in 1933. This is not just for university libraries; general readers will enjoy this remarkable life as well.
- Robert H. Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ontario

About the Author
Historical archaeologist P.J. Capelotti of Penn State University is author or editor of more than a dozen non-fiction histories, including By Airship to the North Pole: an archaeology of human exploration (1999), Sea Drift: Rafting Adventures in the Wake of Kon-Tiki (2001), Life and Death on the Greenland Patrol (2005), The Whaling Expedition of the Ulysses (2010), and Shipwreck at Cape Flora: The Arctic expeditions of England's forgotten explorer, Benjamin Leigh Smith (forthcoming in 2013). His theory of archaeological research in space: The Human Archaeology of Space, was published in 2010 by McFarland. A volume of essays and poetry, Gods Meadow: a summer of poems on the edge of Oslo fjord, was published in 2005, and his first novel, Nautilus: a modern sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, has been described by Clive Cussler as "an amazing tale filled with enigmas filled with riddles and dark mysteries. Truly a fascinating read."