The Journey

Fülszöveg

Portrait of author 1993
"Charles Merrill's will to understand is immense. His book might be read as a harbinger of many searching studies devoted to this peculiar part of the World-Central Europe."
— Czestaw Milosz
CHARLES MERRILL received his formal education at Harvard University and with the Sth Army in Algeria and Italy, including D-Day at Salerno. All his life a history teacher, he started his own school, Commonwealth, in Boston which he ran for 23 years.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, Charles Merrill made a trip to Berlin and Warsaw, and on to Bucharest, Vienna and Prague that launched a never-ending fascination with the history, culture, and daily life of Central and Eastern Europe.
The narrator, starting out as a naive 18-year-old, made well over a dozen visits to Poland and Czechoslovakia and tells what he learned walking along the cities' streets and talking with the friends he gradually made until he found himself somewhat of an insider.... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Portrait of author 1993
"Charles Merrill's will to understand is immense. His book might be read as a harbinger of many searching studies devoted to this peculiar part of the World-Central Europe."
— Czestaw Milosz
CHARLES MERRILL received his formal education at Harvard University and with the Sth Army in Algeria and Italy, including D-Day at Salerno. All his life a history teacher, he started his own school, Commonwealth, in Boston which he ran for 23 years.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, Charles Merrill made a trip to Berlin and Warsaw, and on to Bucharest, Vienna and Prague that launched a never-ending fascination with the history, culture, and daily life of Central and Eastern Europe.
The narrator, starting out as a naive 18-year-old, made well over a dozen visits to Poland and Czechoslovakia and tells what he learned walking along the cities' streets and talking with the friends he gradually made until he found himself somewhat of an insider. How did one learn to bend the rules enough to maintain some form of identity and integrity? Then after the Communist machine fell apart in 1989, the victory cry was a great scrawl of sex & drugs & rock 'n roll beneath the president's palace in Prague, and the supreme gesture was to drive a Mercedes slowly past the homes of one's former friends. How could one build a sense of responsible citizenship?
The Journey is filled with sad and also comic stories, disturbing comparisons — "the historian is the enemy of the patriot"— between the Russians in Eastern Europe and the Americans in Latin America, mafia politics in Warsaw and in New York boardrooms. The author will go beyond good taste in the effort to explore what it means to tell the truth. Vissza