Gottland: Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia

The actress Lída Baarová, over whom Goebbels wept; Otakar Švec, creator of the largest Stalin monument on earth, who killed himself before it was finished; Franz Kafka's niece, visited in her Prague flat; the singer Marta Kubišová, banned by the regime for twenty years after the Prague Spring and erased from the radio archives; Tomáš Baťa, who built a town under his control before Orwell imagined one. Through such lives the book tells of the high price paid for seemingly minor decisions, and breaks the Polish stereotype of the Czechs as a merry nation avoiding hard choices.

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About the book

Form

Nonfiction

Length

237 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, Politics (assigned by AI)

Set in

Czechia

First published

2006 by Wydawnictwo Czarne

Author's age

40 when first published

ISBN

9788389755629 (original)

9781612193137 (Melville House, United States)

More

Wikidata