A real page turner

At 1,505 pages, this is probably the most voluminous work I ever attempted to review here on Amazon. Forget about the family bible, the LA phone directory or the introductory guide to zoning law for here comes “Keys to the Insects of the European Part of the USSR. Volume V. Diptera and Siphonaptera. Part II”. Originally a Soviet work published in the city of our dreams, Leningrad, back in 1969, it was translated to hopefully proper English by the U.S. National Science Foundation in 1988. Edited by G Ya Bei-Bienko (the original) and George C Steyskal (the translation), it's apparently part of a potentially never-ending ultra-encyclopedia called “Keys to the Fauna of the USSR”, more specifically its 103rd volume.

Despite being very old, the work is still of considerable interest to the peculiar subsets of the scientific community known as dipterists and siphonapterists, respectively, since many of the included species have never been studied since the 1960's, when the Soviet original edition was published. Clearly, studying true flies or fleas wasn't the Soviet citizen's first choice of a career (the military-industrial complex or huge steel plants presumably being more lucrative). Yes, it's a scientific reference work dealing with these positively disgusting insects. “Volume V, Part II” covers the so-called higher dipterans (Diptera: Cyclorrhapha) and the fleas (Siphonaptera). I was somewhat shocked to learn that there are 6 families and a total of 160 species of fleas just in the European part of the USSR. As for illustrations, don't hold your breath – most of them show diagnostic characters such as antennae, wings, tarsi, etc. If you love the actual looks and intelligently designed body shapes of these unsavory critters, you are probably better off visiting the local farm…

Finally, the American editor discloses the ins and outs of translating books from Russian. The Russians have a peculiar way of indicating size (saying funny things such as “X is 1.75 times smaller than Y”) and also have two words for the color brown, korichevnyy and buryy, usually translated as “cinnamomeous” and “chocolate-brown”, but here simply rendered as “brown”, period. What a shame, I always wondered if the fleas pestering my tomcat were cinnamon-colored or chocolate-colored (or what region of the former USSR they originally hail from)…

Thank you Amazon for carrying this immensely stimulating work!