In the Fall of 1930, Soviet architect Andrei Konstantinovich Burov was part of a team assembled by Moscow to visit Detroit’s state-of-the-art factories and to establish links with America’s leading industrialists. What follows are excerpts from his letters to his wife Irina, in which he describes his American ...

My father stands roasting in his black neoprene wetsuit, a surfboard jammed under each arm so that he looks like he might just take off at any moment. In his face I find memories, sewn in amongst the creases and the tufts of gray, there to be dug up and ...