Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History - Derek Sayer

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/619208 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History Author: Derek Sayer Narrator: Daniel Henning Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 27 hours 59 minutes Release date: November 22, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2 of Total 1 Genres: Current Affairs, Law, & Politics Publisher's Summary: Postcards from Absurdistan is a cultural and political history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakia's artistically vibrant liberal democracy, to 1989, when the country's socialist regime collapsed after more than four decades of communist dictatorship. Derek Sayer shows that Prague's twentieth century, far from being a story of inexorable progress toward some 'end of history,' whether fascist, communist, or democratic, was a tragicomedy of recurring nightmares played out in a land Czech dissidents dubbed Absurdistan. Situated in the eye of the storms that shaped the modern world, Prague holds up an unsettling mirror to the absurdities and dangers of our own times. In a brilliant narrative, Sayer weaves a vivid montage of the lives of individual Praguers—poets and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedians—caught up in the crosscurrents of the turbulent half century following the Nazi invasion. This is the territory of the ideologist, the collaborator, the informer, the apparatchik, the dissident, the outsider, the torturer, and the refugee—not to mention the innocent bystander who is always looking the other way, and Václav Havel's greengrocer whose knowing complicity allows the show to go on. Prague exposes modernity's dream worlds of progress as confections of kitsch.