A thoughtful insider’s perspective on Eastern Europe’s fitful steps toward democracy.
A Croatian journalist and novelist reconsiders what’s gone right—and wrong—in post-communist Eastern Europe.
In this sequel to Café Europa (1997), Drakulić admits that Eastern Europeans had a “perhaps too rosy” view of the benefits of unity with the West and the ease of attaining it. Especially since the influx of immigrants in 2015 and 2016, questions of national identity have morphed into a virulent nationalism: “These sorts of ideas used to travel from west to east; now they are moving in the opposite direction, as if nationalization and Balkanization were no longer the property of Eastern Europe alone.” The author often returns to points she’s made before but generally gives them fresh life in these 15 graceful essays in which ordinary people and events tend to become metaphors for larger issues—e.g., the “fantastic” European health insurance card or the “ugly” revival of anti-Semitism on the continent. “European Food Apartheid” begins with EU and other investigations that found that food producers were sending subpar products to Poland, Bulgaria, and other former communist countries but opens out to suggest why Eastern bloc nations feel like “second-class consumers” in the EU. Another essay involves a widowed Serbian immigrant and much-admired shopkeeper in Stockholm whose only companion, a pet parrot, was confiscated by Swedish police when he failed to heed their warning to get a larger cage. The incident suggests why Balkan expatriates may feel like strange birds no matter how assimilated. In laying bare human emotions, Drakulić at times slights the larger political picture—in analyzing Viktor Orbán’s appeal to Hungarians, she fails to note that his government largely controls the media, which gives them a lopsided picture of him—but overall, she’s a fine guide to many aspects of a region poorly understood by much of the West.
A thoughtful insider’s perspective on Eastern Europe’s fitful steps toward democracy.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-14-313417-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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