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Dancing Bears

Dancing Bears

True Stories about Longing for the Old Days

by Witold Szablowski and Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Paperback
Publication Date: 26/02/2018

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RRP  $32.99

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$31.50

Incisive, humorous and heartbreaking oral histories of people living in formerly Communist countries holding fast to their former lives, from one of Poland’s finest journalists.

A brilliant, funny and heartbreaking account of people in formerly Communist countries who are nostalgic for how they used to live.

For hundreds of years, Bulgarian Gypsies trained bears to dance, welcoming them into their families and taking them on the road to perform. In the early 2000s, after the fall of Communism, they were forced to release the bears into a wildlife refuge. But, even today, whenever the bears see a human, they still get up on their hind legs to dance.

In the tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski, award-winning Polish journalist Witold Szablowski tells remarkable stories of people throughout Eastern Europe and in Cuba who, like Bulgaria’s dancing bears, are now free but long for when they were not. He describes hitchhiking through Kosovo as it declares independence, arguing with the guides at the Stalin Museum, and sleeping in London’s Victoria Station alongside a homeless Polish woman. Dancing Bears is a fascinating portrait of social and economic upheaval, and a lesson in the challenges of freedom and the seductions of authoritarian rule.

“ Heartrending…A sharply drawn account of people in "newly free societies" who long for life to be the same as it was in the unfree past…Connected by the allegory of performing bears, Szablowski’s melancholy personality studies underscore freedom’s challenges and the seductions of authoritarian rule. ” Publishers Weekly

ISBN:
9781925603361
9781925603361
Category:
Society & culture: general
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
26-02-2018
Publisher:
Text Publishing
Country of origin:
Australia
Pages:
256
Dimensions (mm):
234x154x19mm
Weight:
0.36kg
Witold Szablowski

Witold Szablowski is an award-winning Polish journalist and the author of Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny. At age twenty-five he became the youngest reporter at one of Poland's largest daily newspapers, where he covered international stories in countries including Cuba, South Africa, and Iceland, and won awards for his features on the problem of illegal immigrants flocking to the European Union and the 1943 massacre of Poles in Ukraine. His book about Turkey, The Assassin from Apricot City, won two awards and was nominated for Poland's most prestigious literary prize. Szablowski lives in Warsaw.

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