Muppets in Moscow

This could easily have been a 4 star book if it had been better edited.

3.5 stars. Fascinating book about the efforts to launch a Russian version of Sesame Street in the newly post-Soviet world of the early 1990s . Of course there were culture clashes, but there were also more serious obstacles. Two journalists/broadcasters who offered to air the show on their networks were murdered. Armed Russian police raided the new show's offices and seized irreplaceable scripts. The author, who was a documentarian with no experience in children's programming, repeatedly had to convince the American Sesame Workshop executives not to pull the plug on the production.

Loses half a star for the author's insistence that Ulitsa Sezam was an essential strategy to teach Russian children about the benefits of American democracy. We all know how well that turned out, both for the formerly Evil Empire and our own.