Download or read book A Prague Spring Before After written by Michael Salcman and published by Evening Street Press. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A work of great rage, sorrow, and love, Michael Salcman’s majestic A Prague Spring tells an almost unbearable story that needs to be told over and over and never forgotten. Beginning with coldly matter-of-fact poems of family members lost to and escaping the Shoah, Salcman documents how his parents survived and met, and how he got along in Brooklyn, the glorious borough of his childhood, baseball’s Dodgers, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Finally, he doubles back to visit the country of his birth. And in a series of stunning poems, a prose piece, and a final poem to his cousin Magda, Salcman ties together past and present, and gives us one more glimpse into the soul of a survivor, two really, his older cousin, and himself. —Robert Cooperman, author of In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains, winner of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry A Prague Spring is a beautiful blend of the lyric imagination with historical and autobiographical facts. In this book, ignorance, cruelty, and murder lose. Art, and the truth, wins. —Thomas Lux, Bourne Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and author of God Particles A Prague Spring is a near-epic book of history poems, interweaving the story of Prague with the Holocaust, family deaths and survivals, a book that stuns the reader with the enormities and sorrows of Time. Salcman uses the compression of narrative, meditative and lyric poetry to “bring you looted treasures: History’s twisted snakes.” Here we find a Holocaust survivor who is “a stick leaning on a stick, / an insect on a branch” as well as the backwards-running Jewish clock of Prague (“What city tells time like Prague?”) counterpoised with Salcman’s Brooklyn: “sweet / borough of my youth, heart and lung / of life.” Kafka and Salcman's ancestors haunt the Czech capital where “a pile of dust once pushed a cart of salt and spices / on a medieval street.” The poems revisit totalitarian defenestrations, slaughters and repressions as they recount, wonder and pray, all the time knowing “the brain is a savage beast, it eats when and what / no other organ eats….” At once autobiography, history, testimonial and memorial, A Prague Spring is a revolutionary collection of important and necessary poems, confidently written and—especially with Salcman’s tonal skills—always absorbing; it is further deepened by how perfectly Lynn Silverman’s dark photographs of Prague capture that ancient city’s shadows and ghosts. —Dick Allen, Connecticut State Poet Laureate (2010-2015) and author of This Shadowy Place, Present Vanishing, and Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected

Download or read book The Prague Spring 1968 written by Jarom¡r Navr til and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In addition to revealing the events surrounding the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, this is the first book to document a Cold War crisis from both sides of the Iron Curtain. It is based on unprecedented access to the previously closed archives of each member of the Warsaw Pact, as well as once highly classified American documents from the National Security Council, CIA, and other intelligence agencies." "Presented in a highly readable volume, the book offers top-level documents from Kremlin Politburo meetings, multilateral sessions of the Warsaw Pact leading up to the decision to invade, transcripts of KGB-recorded telephone conversations between Leonid Brezhnev and Alexander Dubcek." "To provide a historical and political context, the editors have prepared essays to introduce each section of the volume. A chronology, glossary and bibliography offer further background information for the reader." "The editors have a unique perspective to offer to foreign audiences since they are members of the commission appointed by Vaclav Havel to investigate the events of 1967-1970."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book The Greengrocer and His TV written by Paulina Bren and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia brought an end to the Prague Spring and its promise of "socialism with a human face." Before the invasion, Czech reformers had made unexpected use of television to advance political and social change. In its aftermath, Communist Party leaders employed the medium to achieve "normalization," pitching television stars against political dissidents in a televised spectacle that defined the times. The Greengrocer and His TV offers a new cultural history of communism from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution that reveals how state-endorsed ideologies were played out on television, particularly through soap opera-like serials. In focusing on the small screen, Paulina Bren looks to the "normal" of normalization, to the everyday experience of late communism. The figure central to this book is the greengrocer who, in a seminal essay by Václav Havel, symbolized the ordinary citizen who acquiesced to the communist regime out of fear. Bren challenges simplistic dichotomies of fearful acquiescence and courageous dissent to dramatically reconfigure what we know, or think we know, about everyday life under communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Deftly moving between the small screen, the street, and the Central Committee (and imaginatively drawing on a wide range of sources that include television shows, TV viewers' letters, newspapers, radio programs, the underground press, and the Communist Party archives), Bren shows how Havel's greengrocer actually experienced "normalization" and the ways in which popular television serials framed this experience. Now back by popular demand, socialist-era serials, such as The Woman Behind the Counter and The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, provide, Bren contends, a way of seeing—literally and figuratively—Czechoslovakia's normalization and Eastern Europe's real socialism.

Download or read book Conversations with Gorbachev written by Mikhail Gorbachev and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-14 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenek Mlynar were friends for half a century, since they first crossed paths as students in 1950. Although one was a Russian and the other a Czech, they were both ardent supporters of communism and socialism. One took part in laying the groundwork for and carrying out the Prague spring; the other opened a new political era in Soviet world politics. In 1993 they decided that their conversations might be of interest to others and so they began to tape-record them. This book is the product of that “thinking out loud” process. It is an absorbing record of two friends trying to explain to one another their views on the problems and events that determined their destinies. From reminiscences of their starry-eyed university days to reflections on the use of force to “save socialism” to contemplation of the end of the cold war, here is a far more candid picture of Gorbachev than we have ever seen before.

Download or read book The Logic of normalization written by Fred H. Eidlin and published by Fred Eidlin. This book was released on 1980 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a valuable addition to the literature related to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The author focusses his analysis on the facotrs that determined the post-invasion "normalization" primarily in terms of the Czechoslovak response to the invasion which imparted a specific character to the aftermath of the action of the Warsaw Pact.

Download or read book Prague Spring written by Simon Mawer and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Room Simon Mawer returns to Czechoslovakia, this time during the turbulent 1960s, with a suspenseful story that mixes sex, politics, and betrayal. In the summer of 1968--a year of love and hate, of Prague Spring and Cold War winter--Oxford students James Borthwick and Eleanor Pike set out to hitchhike across Europe, complicating a budding friendship that could be something more. Having reached southern Germany, they decide on a whim to visit Czechoslovakia, where Alexander Dubček's "socialism with a human face" is smiling on the world. Meanwhile, Sam Wareham, First Secretary at the British embassy in Prague, is observing developments in the country with both a diplomat's cynicism and a young man's passion. In the company of Czech student Lenka Konečková, he finds a way into the world of Czechoslovak youth, its hopes and its ideas. For the first time, nothing seems off limits behind the Iron Curtain. Yet the wheels of politics are grinding in the background. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev is making demands of Dubček, and the Red Army is amassed on the borders. How will the looming disaster affect those fragile lives caught up in the invasion? With this shrewd, engrossing, and sensual novel, Simon Mawer cements his status as one of the most talented writers of historical spy fiction today.

Download or read book Invasion 68 Prague written by Josef Koudelka and published by Aperture. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "DECREAZIONE" is a book collecting Joseph Koudelka's images exhibited at the fifty-firth Venice Biennale, at the Vatican Pavilion. With his suggestive black-and-white images and his moving, desolated landscapes, Koudelka tells stories of destruction, declined in three different forms: time, violence, and contrast between nature and uncontrolled industrial development. Josef Koudelka was born in Moravia in 1938. He published numerous photographic books on the relationship between man and landscape, about gypsy life, and on the invasion of Prague in 1968. Significant exhibitions of his works have been held at international museums and galleries and he received numerous major awards.

Download or read book The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring written by Vladimir V. Kusin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-18 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of the development of reformist ideas among the Czech intelligentsia after 1956.

Download or read book The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath written by Kieran Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-09-08 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Prague Spring of 1968 was among the most important episodes in post-war European politics. In this book Kieran Williams analyses the attempt at reform socialism under Alexander Dubcek using materials and sources which have become available in the wake of the 1989 revolution. Drawing on declassified documents from party archives, the author readdresses important questions surrounding the Prague Spring: Why did liberalization occur? What was it intended to achieve? Why did the Soviet Union intervene with force? What was the political outcome of the invasion? What part did the reformers play in ending the experiment in reform socialism? What was the role of the security police under Dubcek? The book will provide new information for specialists as well as introductory analysis and narrative for students of East European politics and history and Soviet foreign policy.

Download or read book The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia 1968 written by M. Mark Stolarik and published by Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. This book was released on 2010 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays and comments presented at an international conference held at University of Ottawa, Oct. 9-10, 2008.

Download or read book The Prague Cemetery written by Umberto Eco and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Prague Cemetery is the #1 international bestselling historical novel from the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco. Nineteenth-century Europe—from Turin to Prague to Paris—abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. Conspiracies rule history. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if behind all of these conspiracies, both real and imagined, lay one lone man? “Choreographed by a truth that is itself so strange a novelist need hardly expand on it to produce a wondrous tale... Eco is to be applauded for bringing this stranger-than-fiction truth vividly to life.” —The New York Times

Download or read book Between Prague Spring and French May written by Martin Klimke and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abandoning the usual Cold War–oriented narrative of postwar European protest and opposition movements, this volume offers an innovative, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive perspective on two decades of protest and social upheaval in postwar Europe. It examines the mutual influences and interactions among dissenters in Western Europe, the Warsaw Pact countries, and the nonaligned European countries, and shows how ideological and political developments in the East and West were interconnected through official state or party channels as well as a variety of private and clandestine contacts. Focusing on issues arising from the cross-cultural transfer of ideas, the adjustments to institutional and political frameworks, and the role of the media in staging protest, the volume examines the romanticized attitude of Western activists to violent liberation movements in the Third World and the idolization of imprisoned RAF members as martyrs among left-wing circles across Western Europe.

Download or read book Hope Dies Last written by Alexander Dubcek and published by Kodansha Amer Incorporated. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Unbearable Lightness of Being written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” — People In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine. This magnificent novel is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.

Download or read book The Socialist Sixties written by Anne E. Gorsuch and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-12 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A very engaging collection of essays that adds much to an evolving literature on the social history of the Soviet Union and broader socialist societies.” —Choice The 1960s have reemerged in scholarly and popular culture as a protean moment of cultural revolution and social transformation. In this volume socialist societies in the Second World (the Soviet Union, East European countries, and Cuba) are the springboard for exploring global interconnections and cultural cross-pollination between communist and capitalist countries and within the communist world. Themes explored include flows of people and media; the emergence of a flourishing youth culture; sharing of songs, films, and personal experiences through tourism and international festivals; and the rise of a socialist consumer culture and an esthetics of modernity. Challenging traditional categories of analysis and periodization, this book brings the sixties problematic to Soviet studies while introducing the socialist experience into scholarly conversations traditionally dominated by First World perspectives.

Download or read book The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 written by Günter Bischof and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays of a dozen leading European and American Cold War historians analyze the 'Prague Spring' and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in light of new documentary evidence from the archives of two dozen countries and explain what happened behind the scenes. They al...

Download or read book Spain s revolution against Franco The great betrayal written by Alan Woods and published by Wellred Books. This book was released on 2019-10-25 with total page 653 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the Spanish revolution of the 1930s is quite well known to most people on the left, but there is a surprising level of ignorance concerning the events that occurred subsequently. History did not cease with the victory of Franco in 1939. And the story of how the Franco dictatorship was eventually brought down by the revolutionary movement of the Spanish workers is an inspiring one. Under the most difficult and dangerous conditions, Spanish workers launched a strike wave, which, in its intensity and duration, has no parallel anywhere. There was nothing remotely like this in Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy or Salazar’s Portugal. This was a genuine revolution, which could and should have gone far further than it did. If it did not finally succeed, that was no fault of the working class. The Spanish revolution of the 1970s was shamefully betrayed by the leaders of the communist and socialist parties, who entered into an agreement with former fascists in order halt the movement in its tracks. Alan Woods participated personally in the last phase of this struggle and was a witness to some of its most decisive moments. Using a wealth of documentary material from the time and also new interviews with key participants in the events, he tears away the thick veil of lies, myths and half-truths to reveal what actually occurred. With new struggles and challenges on the order of the day in Spain and the rest of the world, it is the duty of all conscious workers and revolutionary youth to study the lessons of the past as a necessary precondition for victory in the future. This book is an important contribution to a necessary learning process and is obligatory reading for anyone who is interested in the struggle for socialism today.