Nice, April 4, 1931 · Menlo Park, April 15, 2024
Author, publisher, and American by choice. A twentieth-century life that led from the Russian emigration in Europe to California, and a lifelong faith in the country he chose.
Alexander Kugushev was born in Nice, France, on April 4, 1931, to Russian émigré parents. He descended from the princely Kugushev family, Russian nobility of Tatar origin whose recorded line reaches back to the seventeenth century. He grew up in a Europe torn apart by the conflicts between the two World Wars, was educated successively in Yugoslavia, Austria, and Switzerland, and lived through World War II as a boy. He would later call the war the defining experience of his life.
At seventeen he emigrated with his mother to Argentina, where he received his higher education, studying journalism at night while working by day. In 1960 he immigrated to the United States. His American life ran from longshoreman on the docks to entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. In 1966 he settled in Menlo Park, California, his home for the rest of his life.
A journalist by trade and a publisher by profession, he spent more than forty years publishing educational materials in the United States, in print and online. In 1968, together with Bob Gormley, he founded Duxbury Press, which grew into one of the country's leading publishers of statistics and mathematics textbooks and later became an imprint of Wadsworth Publishing. Titles he commissioned carried the line "An Alexander Kugushev Book" on their covers, a distinction rarely given to an editor.
In the 1990s he founded and led CyberGnostics, an online educational publisher. Its CyberStats was among the first fully web-based college textbooks, and it was later acquired by Thomson Learning. An admirer of Italian culture, he served as president of Il Cenacolo, the storied Italian cultural club of San Francisco, founded in 1928.
A committed, naturalized American, he loved his adopted country with the clear-eyed devotion of someone who had seen the alternatives. His books are, above all, an argument for America: for its resilience, its immigrants, and its public schools.
7 languages
including English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Russian
70+ countries
traveled across a lifetime
5 books
written in his seventies, eighties, and nineties
The Kugushev family appears in the records of the Russian state from 1639, when murza Akay Kugushev received estates in the Temnikov district, later part of Tambov Governorate. The family was recognized among the Tatar princes of the Russian Empire.
On his mother's side he was a grandson of Professor Mikhail Nikitich Lapinsky (1862-1947), the eminent Russian neurologist. Lapinsky headed the department of psychiatry and neuropathology at Kiev University and, after emigrating in 1919, founded the clinic of nervous and mental diseases at Zagreb University, where he taught for twenty-five years.
His mother was born in 1900 and fled Russia by ship from Sevastopol in February 1920. Her life spanned two revolutions, two World Wars, and exile. He told her story in Under the Wheel of History, his translation of her memoir.
His wife, Mimi Kugushev, did extensive volunteer work on the San Francisco Peninsula, in Silicon Valley. She served as president of Peninsula Volunteers and co-chaired the annual fundraiser of the MidPeninsula League of the San Francisco Symphony.
Since 2008 the United States has weathered economic, political, and public health crises. Writing in his tenth decade, Kugushev asks whether the country's famed resilience still holds, and answers with a measured yes: an optimistic account of America's prospects over the next two to three decades.
How the United States came to rank thirty-fourth in the world in education, what our culture has to do with it, and a concrete program to reform public education rather than privatize it.
The Torch Still Burning Bright
Several dozen immigrants from thirty-seven countries, together with their children and grandchildren, speak about their experience of America. Their voices carry an argument for steady, well-considered legal immigration as a source of American renewal.
A Woman's Journey through the Twentieth Century
His mother's memoir, translated from Russian and set in the context of her times: two revolutions, two World Wars, and exile, from her birth in 1900 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
An Immigrant Examines Our Nation's Adaptive Continuity
At a time of national self-doubt, a much-traveled immigrant compares the cultures of his earlier life with America's. He finds not decline but recurrent resilience: a centered, enduring, self-renewing nation.
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