Ludmila Isurin is a professor at the Ohio State University. An interdisciplinary scholar whose research encompasses psycho- and sociolinguistics, social sciences and humanities with a recent focus on how collective memory is reflected in text and constructed in individual minds, she has written numerous chapters and journal articles, including an award-winning article in Language Learning. She has authored or coedited six books, including Collective Remembering.

• Introduction Part I: Theoretical background Chapter 1: Group memory: Construction, reconstruction, and distortion Chapter 2: Collective memory, journalism, and news making Chapter 3: How the mind processes text, media news, and misinformation Chapter 4: Socio-cognitive approach to the construction of memory: At the intersection of media, memory, and the mind Part 2: Collective memory construction in Russian and U.S. media Chapter 5: Media, the mind and the reenactment of the enemy: Methodology Chapter 6: Takeover of Crimea Chapter 7: Conflict in Eastern Ukraine and the MH17 downing Chapter 8: Civil war in Syria and the 2016 U.S. elections Chapter 9: The 2014 Sochi Olympics and the 2018 poisoning of the Skripals Chapter 10: How the mind constructs a memory of recent political events Part 3: Reenacting the enemy in media and in the mind Chapter 11: Memory, media, and the mind: Revisiting the framework Conclusion

Isurin brings deep expertise on culture and media in the U.S. and Russia to show how prejudice toward the other grows out its desire to project its own attitudes and values as superior. She then goes on to demonstrate how this dynamic organizes national memory. She also argues that at least in some instances an independent, liberal media in Russia provides a surprising critical view that is less evident on the American side. Her conclusions may be uncomfortable for both American and Russian readers, but that is the point and one of the book's great contributions. This is a brilliant contribution to memory studies in general, and to advancing understanding of why relations between Russia and the U.S. remain so fraught.