Picador Books

2 total works

Russian Voices

by Tony Parker

Published 4 April 1991

Tony Parker spent five months in Moscow in 1990, interviewing wherever he went - and everywhere finding people ready and eager to talk and to exercise their new freedom to speak without fear. From their words he builds a surprising and entertaining kaleidoscope of the Soviet Union today - a picture which includes the manager of huge internationally famous GUM Department Store, a stagehand at the Bolshoi Theatre and the director of the USSR's first McDonald's hamburger bar. He spoke to a World War II tank commander, an army veteran recently returned from Afghanistan, to hippies and pacifists, as well as meeting a chess Grandmaster, a beauty queen, a private detective, and drinking tea for two hours in the Lubianka with officers of the KGB. Scientists, academicians, doctors, old people, schoolchildren, workers - all respond to Tony Parker's skill in loosening tongues and encouraging individuals to speak for themselves.

The People of Providence

by Tony Parker

Published 16 May 1983

Over a period of eighteen months Tony Parker interviewed the residents of an ordinary housing estate in South London. He listened to an assorted mixture of personalities - including a vagrant, two policemen, an often-convicted fence who was the mother of five children, a pro-flogging magistrate, a local doctor, and a 75-year-old widower who spent "an hour or two in bed each week with one or other of about twelve different ladies I meet at our church". The inhabitants of "Providence" opened their hearts, revealing all their quirks, emotions and prejudices. These interviews prove that extraordinary stories are found not only in deserts and jungles: even amid the bleak sprawl of South London, Tony Parker discovered a community that is diverse and enthralling.