The author, a Russian-speaking Berkeley professor of psycholinguistics, spent significant periods of time in the USSR in the eras of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and Putin. He writes: "Russia and Russian have been an important part of my life. In 1959, when I was 20, I was a guide in Moscow at the first exchange of exhibitions between the USA and the USSR. “Glimpses” begins with a long account of encounters in the Khrushchev era, followed by travel journals from later trips in the Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and Putin eras. I went back twice to my mother's hometown in Ukraine, with a chilling encounter in 1966 that could have been written by a combination of Gogol and Kafka."