- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: HarperPerennial; 1st HarperPerennial Ed edition (May 1993)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0060975407
- ISBN-13: 978-0060975401
- Product Dimensions: 20.1 x 13.2 x 1.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 834,508 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
thought provoking,
By
This review is from: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (Paperback)
I'm going to give this five stars quite simply because I haven't been able to get this book out of my head. I read it, appropriately enough, on a holiday exploring Eastern Europe by train. To most of us, our knowledge of the fall of Communism and the era beforehand is dictated from newspapers and maybe arthouse films. This book tells you what it was like day to day by the inclusion of unforgettable detail such as the lack of fashion and cosmetics available to women. Before you dismiss this as a shallow review, how about the fact that thousands of women in Poland had the same colour hair when the only hair colourant was a mahogany plum? Or cafes where you weren't allowed to drink Coca-Cola? or government housing that ended up dividing family apartments into two so other families could live the other side of the petition in cramped orderliness? Or the diet of turnips and beetroot? Drakulic reports on the depression and frustration of women who have all their choices removed. They had no personal freedom. We take all this for granted in the day to day activities that make being female so enjoyable. What shall I wear? Where shall we go tonight? Shall we stop for coffee? Shall we go shopping? All these decisions were made by middle aged, male government ministers in the corridors of power. And the answer was no. This is the kind of inside information that you would never otherwise find out or give a thought to. There is violence too, and the threat of imprisonment or the removal of what meagre liberties there were. I will never take my lifestyle for granted again.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An Interesting Look at Ordinary Lives under Communism,
By A Customer
This review is from: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (Paperback)
This is not a great book. This is a pretty good book. It is an interesting book, but not an important book. Slavenka Drakulic, itinerant Croatian writer, gives us communism on the ground. There are no ideological struggles here, no discussions of the finer points of Marxist theology. Instead Drakulic demonstrates clearly that communism is empty, that it failed its citizens, its leaders, and itself. Forty-five years of communist leadership in Yugoslavia failed to produce livable apartments, affordable telephones, sanitary products for women, dolls for children. In short, communism failed because all along it was a massive shell game where the party members were haves and everyone else were have-nots. It failed because it generated fear instead of happiness. Worse, communism continues. We in the West like to use 1990 as a pushpin year for "the end of communism", but Drakulic demonstrates that communism thrives, if not in the government ministries of eastern Europe, then in the hearts and minds and habits and fears of its inhabitants. The funereal atmosphere in Zagreb as Croatia held its first democratic elections in decades, the compulsive hoarding by a populace made wary by the unreliability of supplies of staples and everyday products, the resignation to lives no better than those of parents and grandparents. These sensibilities endure in eastern Europe, and they probably will go on for decades until a younger generation with no memory of communist economic planning and political oversight steps to the fore. "The end of communism is still remote because communism, more than a political ideology or a method of government, is a state of mind." Finally, Drakulic shows us that the "trivial is political". That communism has successfully achieved it aim of raising the political consciousness of the masses, for when trivial acts such as buying toilet paper and making a phone call are made contingent on political decisions by faceless, scary bureaucrats in forbidding buildings, then every act and every person becomes politicized. Politicized in silent yielding opposition to authority, but not politicized to challenge the legitimacy of such an illegitimate regime. Drakulic's essays are touching and humorous. They are as sad as the story of half the women in Poland suddenly sprouting red hair, because red was the only color of hair dye available. These essays bring us nose-to-nose with the unfortunates forced to endure in a political system whose strong point was always in theory and whose weak points were generation after generation of misery for millions of people in dozens of countries.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incredible book.,
By A Customer
This review is from: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (Paperback)
My family discovered this book before it was distributed in the U.S. - a cousin who was living in Hungary sent it to her mother and since then the book has been passed around to just about every female member of our family. I am not much of a reader of nonfiction, and I knew almost nothing about the former Yugoslavia before I read the book, yet I was fascinated and eventually was moved to a remarkable sense of affiliation with these women. Helps one put one's own life in perspective.
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