If the world can be divided into two distinct groups, maybe half would play it safe while the other half pursues their passion through every imaginable risk. Some people make the news while others prefer to watch it on television. Jennifer Beth Cohen followed her desire beyond peril’s gates into a Russia where the society was not only coming apart but morphing back together again in ways no one could dream, let alone predict. She fell in love, abandoned her life in Manhattan and moved to Moscow and chronicled her journal in her debut, Lying Together, My Russian Affair.

Cohen chased a hazardous tale about the Russian mob’s stranglehold on global prostitution while romancing with Kevin, an unforgotten college heart throb. She went looking for love in all the wrong places and found Doctor Zhivago on acid. Her love affair, both with Kevin as well as her work in a dangerously fragmented land, is written from the heart. She turns her journalistic eye inward and reports upon herself with scalding honesty. She’s in love with Kevin who is handsome, sexy and has a Rolodex of Russian contacts at her disposal. Cohen sees her world expanding both romantically and professionally. Great love. Great articles. Countless kisses and maybe a few awards. Russia is a volcano of stories, each one lethal, every one a jagged puzzle piece left behind by the old Soviet Union. But the newsrooms back in the U.S.A. don’t want cutting edge journalism highlighting the new Russia. They prefer easily digested Russian stereotypes rather than complicated Russian gangsters and how they rule the land.

Make no doubt about it, this is truly Jennifer Cohen’s story despite how deeply she loves Kevin. Right down to the engagement ring on her finger that was pried off the bloody hand of a Russian mobster’s girlfriend following their assassination. Kevin thought the ring, with its history, its color, was a flavor of Russia today. From the moment she placed the ring on her finger, her story crashes through the looking glass. Kevin’s “work” suddenly takes priority and the few times they land on a story together, you can feel the professional tension. After all, Kevin is the one with the contacts in Moscow and St.Petersburg while Cohen slowly becomes an outsider in her own home. A meeting with friends suddenly becomes an intervention designed to get Kevin into a substance abuse rehab thus leaving the author alone in a country gone berserk.

Jennifer Beth Cohen opens herself with every sentence and buried within the descriptions of each incident lay the Russian face with which she came eye to eye. Lying Together, My Russian Affair is an intimate book because she shows us Russia by baring both the love and the scars left her by a dangerous land.