A Love Letter to Concrete

If you're interested in tracking down copies of A Russian Course, it appears to still be in print via Slavica Publishers at Indiana University: https://slavica.indiana.edu/bookListings/textbooks/A_Russian...

And the recorded audio material that used to be distributed on tapes with the books can be purchased in MP3 format from Boston University's Geddes Language Center: http://www.bu.edu/geddes/services/

"A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" has a lot of concrete in it. Love of the tool, acceptance of doing the best job you can, the pains of using concrete in a cold climate. Solzhenitsyn probably knew what he was talking about.

If you are trying to build a new society, the word "build" isn't co-incidental.

They talk about Concrete City as if it's satire, but when I read the title, I assumed it would have something to do with Concrete, Washington. A real place, named after the substance, and immortalized in This Boy's Life, by Tobias Wolff.

There is a Russian novel, I guess a monument of socialist realism, called Concrete. I bought an English translation, but somehow never got up the energy to read it.