Reactions to "The Repatriate: Love, Basketball, and the KGB" by Tom Mooradian

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    In sharing his life behind the Iron Curtain, Tom Mooradian's book is a must read for today's generation to fully grasp the terror that cloaked the subjected peoples of the decadent Soviet Union. I've known the author since Tom excelled in academics in the classroom and as an All-Star basketball player at Detroit Southwestern High School.
    When Tom left for the Soviet Armenian republic in 1947, I was certain Tom's opinionated comments would eventually earn him a one-way ticket to a Siberian slave labor camp.
    But my old classmate survived, thanks to his basketball skills and willingness to teach the game to Soviet athletes. Like his ancestors who survived the Turkish massacres of 1915 and their subsequent enslavement by the Kremlin dictators of the now vanquished Soviet Union, Tom Mooradian's freedom is a story that needs to be read by those who now question if the Cold War even existed and if a global nuclear conflict was a threat to humankind.

Mitch Kehetian
Macomb Daily Managing Editor, Retired
Michigan

***

"Fascinating."
    That's what I said when I put down your manuscript and stepped out-doors on my sun-drenched lawn and realized I was back home, in Hawaii, and not with you in Copenhagen, where we landed from Moscow, or in Moscow itself, which I too left, 50 years ago.
    You brought them all back, raw and graphic memories of the Soviet Union we both knew, which now is no more, and is so different from the sunny Hawaii I knows now. What a contrast.
    That's what I meant when I said "fascinating."
    Everybody smiles here. Everybody we saw on the sidewalks of the Soviet Union stared glumly ahead of them, instantly suspicious if they caught you looking at them.
    Fear was everywhere. In America fear is nowhere, comparatively. If anything, we're cocky.
    Your story is of a world that's gone, thank God. You have brought it back to life, for us to look back on, with horror.

Roy Essoyan
Foreign Correspondent, Retired
Hawaii


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