A controversial, insightful work from Poland’s 2013 journalist of the year.
Impassioned, insightful snapshots of life in pre–Velvet Revolution Czechoslovakia.
Winner of the 2009 European Book Prize, acclaimed Polish journalist Szczygiel’s well-researched, unsunny volume of “mostly true stories” forms an indelible impression of the Czech population. His glimpses encapsulate the struggles of these hardscrabble citizens prior to the nation’s liberation in 1993, with strength and resilience as the operative themes threaded throughout. The sweeping opening biography focuses on the rise of innovative Czech entrepreneur Tomas Bata, who revolutionized the shoe manufacturing business using the Henry Ford assembly-line production model. The author also profiles the tangled life of actress Lida Baarova, who, for two years during her early 20s, became the mistress of Joseph Goebbels, the “Minister of Propaganda” for Hitler's National Socialist government. Also of note are creatively drawn portrayals of struggling pop singer Marta Kubisova, whose songs were censored and removed from public consumption, and a poignant report on the life of teenage Prague student Zdenek Adamec, who became increasingly appalled by the conditions in the Czech Republic and committed public suicide by self-immolation. Szczygiel explores the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in searing pieces revealing the true extent of the mass liquidation of “anything that brings simple pleasure” to the public. The author also offers an inventive take on the metamorphosis of the “Cubist personality” of provocative writer Eduard Kirchberger into pseudonym “Karel Fabian.” All of these congruous pieces create a patchwork tapestry of Central European history. Whether chronicling the sculpting of Prague’s monument to Joseph Stalin or the dubious allegiances of writer Jan Prochazka, the atmosphere Szczygiel evokes is glumly foreboding yet intensely interesting.
A controversial, insightful work from Poland’s 2013 journalist of the year.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61219-313-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
The Johnstown Flood was one of the greatest natural disasters of all time (actually manmade, since it was precipitated by a wealthy country club dam which had long been the source of justified misgivings). This then is a routine rundown of the catastrophe of May 31st, 1889, the biggest news story since Lincoln's murder in which thousands died. The most interesting incidental: a baby floated unharmed in its cradle for eighty miles.... Perhaps of local interest-but it lacks the Lord-ly touch.
Pub Date: March 18, 1968
ISBN: 0671207148
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1968
IN THE NEWS
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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