WESTBOROUGH, Mass., April 26, 2005 (PRIMEZONE) -- At the age of 21, the seemingly perpetually restless John W. Adkins left his home in Maryland for adventure and vanished into the world. Edward M. Perdue has spent nearly 20 years tracing his second cousin's steps, a strange journey he chronicles in his new book, Lost Adventures: From Wango to Solovetski Island with John W. Adkins (now available through AuthorHouse).
For Perdue, the fascination began with a simple line written about Adkins in a family history: "He left home at an early age and never returned home again." The book follows the wanderer's tracks out of Maryland and across the country. In 1926, he was arrested in Russia because he had no identification. Over the next three years, Adkins bounced from Moscow, Tula and Leningrad in the Soviet Union to Estonia and Finland. In November 1929, he was sentenced to imprisonment at the Solovesti Gulag, a concentration camp. Here, Adkins' footprints vanish in the frozen tundra of Russia. He simply disappeared into history.
Lost Adventures is a genealogical detective story, the result of nearly 20 years of research. Perdue has collected perhaps the vastest array of Russian documents from a government still mired in the secrecy of the KGB and veiled by the specter of the Iron Curtain. The detailed history offers reprints of all the original documents as well as direct translations. Perdue's extensive book is accompanied by four thorough appendices that lists sources, family information and summaries to enrich the reader's experience. Beyond the material, Lost Adventures makes a perfect textbook for classes dealing with the early years of the Soviet Union and a helpful tool for those learning the Russian language.
A grand historical mystery, Lost Adventures is a genealogical masterpiece that searches for a ghost who left his home in the states and vanished in the snow of a distant land.
A retired electrical engineer, Perdue earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland and a master's degree from Northeastern University in Massachusetts. He has traveled extensively throughout his life since leaving the small Maryland farm of his youth. He served in the U.S. Air Force and worked in Missouri, Hawaii, Panama, Thailand, Lebanon and Iran as a technician installing and testing large earth satellite communication terminals. He worked as a design engineer of communication hardware and spent time in France, England, China and Russia, either for work, conferences, vacation or research.
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