In this epic but sprightly history, journalist and critic Pinkham explores the central role forests have played in the Russian cultural imagination. Noting that “long after western Europe had felled a large portion of its trees, the Russian Empire still had more forests than it could map,” and that today the country contains “one-fifth of the world’s forest cover.” …She traces this “contradictory attitude” toward the forest over time, pegging it as a manifestation of the ambivalence of a “place that has long been torn between east and west, city and country… past and future.” She identifies is the forest’s longstanding dual role as both a defensive bulwark against outsiders (a role it served from the 13th-century Mongol invasion to the 20th-century Nazi one) and a modernizing resource that helps integrate Russia with the rest of the world (timber-harvesting was essential for both Peter the Great’s empire-expanding naval fleet and the Soviets’ rapid industrialization).