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.

About the Author:

S. Frederick Starr was raised in the Midwest and spent most of his adult years in the East, Gulf South, and Russia/Central Asia. He was a founder of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, both in Washington; vice-president of Tulane, president of Oberlin College and of the Aspen Institute; and was a founder of the Greater New Orleans Foundation. He also served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and a founding trustee of five universities in Central Asia and the Caucasus. He is the author or editor of more than two dozen books on history, music, architecture, local history, international affairs, and the culture of Central Asia. His book Lost Enlightenment has been translated into twenty-two languages.