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The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Hardcover)

by Derek Sayer (Author) "FEW ARTISTS so obviously evoke a period and a place as Alphonse Mucha ..." (more)
1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 442 pages
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press (21 May 1998)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0691057605
  • ISBN-13: 978-0691057606
  • Product Dimensions: 24.1 x 16.3 x 3.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,694,451 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  • See Complete Table of Contents

Product Description

Review

A masterful essay on the ironies and tragedies of both the cultural history of the Czechs and Czech culture's history of its own past.


Product Description

In "The Winter's Tale", Shakespeare gave the landlocked country of Bohemia a coastline - a famous and, to Czechs, typical example of foreigners' ignorance of the Czech homeland. Although the lands that were once the Kingdom of Bohemia lie at the heart of Europe, Czechs are usually encountered in the margins of other people's stories. In this book, Derek Sayer reverses this perspective. He presents a history of the Czech people that is also a history of modern Europe, told from its uneasy centre. Sayer shows that Bohemia has long been a theatre of European conflict. It has been a cradle of Protestantism and a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation; an Austrian imperial province and a proudly Slavonic national state; the most easterly democracy in Europe and a westerly outlier of the Soviet bloc. The complexities of its location have given rise to profound (and often profoundly comic) reflections on the modern condition. Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek and Milan Kundera are all products of its spirit of place. Sayer describes how Bohemia's ambiguities and contradictions are those of Europe itself, and he considers the ironies of viewing Europe, the West and modernity from the vantage point of a country that has been too often ignored. It draws on literary, musical, visual and documentary sources, ranging from banknotes to statues, museum displays to school textbooks, funeral orations to operatic stage-sets, murals in subway stations to censors' indexes of banned books. It brings us into contact with the ever changing details of daily life - the street names and facades of buildings, the heroes figured on postage stamps - that have created and recreated a sense of what it is to be Czech.
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First Sentence
FEW ARTISTS so obviously evoke a period and a place as Alphonse Mucha. Read the first page
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Not a history - More of a bore, 15 Feb 2009
By Thomas Paul (Plainview, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Paperback)
If a book claims to be a history of a place, then it should at least give the reader decent coverage of the history of that place. But this book fails in that most basic requirement. The author is much more interested in discussing Alfons Mucha and how the Munich Agreement affected this relatively unknown artist than he is in discussing how Czechoslovakia ended up the victim of Hitler. But that fairly well reflects the book as it is more a history of various Czech authors and artists than it is of the Czech people.

The back of the book makes the claim that the book is a "comprehensive history of the Czech people." Unfortunately this is not true. Turn to any page and instead of reading about an event in Czech history, you will read about a sculptor or magazine editor and how they felt about some event that is never actually explained. The book is a struggle to get through if you are not already familiar with the history of Bohemia. If you don't know much about the Slansky trials of the early 1950's, don't expect to know more after reading this book other than what books were banned. And for some unexplained reason, the author decided to end his book in 1960, just before the the reforms that led to the Velvet Revolution. I learned much more about Czech history reading "Under the Cruel Star" than I did reading this book.

Perhaps the book would have been better off described as a review of art and literature in Bohemia up until 1960. At least the book would have been more accurate in its description. After reading this book, I do not feel that I understand the people of the Czech Republic any better than when I started. I can truly say that this is a book that I did not enjoy reading in the least. If ever there was a book that made me feel I wasted my money, this is that book.
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