- Paperback: 193 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (18 Feb 1993)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099265710
- ISBN-13: 978-0099265719
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
89,577 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #21 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Political & Social Issues > Activism
- #47 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Critical Theory
- #56 in Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Government & Politics > Political Science & Ideology > Communism & Marxism
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
In 1990 Slavenka Drakulic travelled through Yugoslavia, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, spending time with women and listening to their life stories, cooking with them, drinking coffee when they had any, learning how they had survived communism, and sometimes managing to laugh. This is her account of those women's lives in pre-revolutionary Eastern Europe. The author, a journalist and cultural commentator in the former Yugoslavia, was a co-founder of that country's first feminist group in 1979.
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First Sentence
The title of my book feels wrong, I kept thinking as my plane soared off the runway at Zagreb airport. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
The title of my book feels wrong, I kept thinking as my plane soared off the runway at Zagreb airport. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format: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
Format: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
Format: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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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Higly Recomended
Book which I Ordered was delivered the same day, well packaged and very good price, also I received the complementary copy of Homer book
Published 8 months ago by Tracey
Vivid day-to-day life behind the 'Iron Curtain'.
Very vivid descriptions and recollections of how day-to-day life in communist Yugoslavia, and other central European cities, actually was for people - and women in particular. Read more
Published 19 months ago by Paul Harris
nostalgy and cliches
This book is excellent for those who never lived in a communist country; those who did want to look forward and will find the author's obsession with the past communist regime a... Read more
Published on 19 Aug 2001
A Provocative Look at How Communism Failed it's People
Slavenka explores the perplexing lives of Eastern European women living in Communism through her short essays. There is nothing funny about these stories. Read more
Published on 9 July 1999
Should be required reading for all women's studies classes!
I read this book while I was living in Prague. Living in Eastern Europe does not automatically ensure an understanding of the people or the culture, and this book was very... Read more
Published on 5 Feb 1999
A life-changing experience
I was assigned this book in a second-year women's history class when I was an undergraduate...thanks, professor Whitney! Read more
Published on 1 July 1998
Amazingly Perceptive
Slavenka Drakulic's writings are to be savored. Read her collections of essays in chronological order. Read more
Published on 4 May 1998
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