Between Security and Insecurity

New York. 1999. Thames & Hudson. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Wrappers. 0500281580. Translated from the Czech by Gerry Turner. General Editor: Yorick Blumenfeld. 88 pages. paperback. Original photo for cover design by James Austin. keywords: Politics Czech Literature Translated. DESCRIPTION - As we come to the end of a century of political turbulence and stand at the threshold of the next, who better than Ivan Klima to raise and respond to the key questions about our future? As a child, he survived three years in a Fascist concentration camp, only then to undergo nearly twenty years of censorship under another totalitarian regime - this time Communist. Klima was virtually forbidden to follow his chosen profession as writer, and prohibited from publishing. Ample experience indeed of the darker aspects of our recent history. Perhaps surprisingly, given these beginnings, the voice that emerges is a profoundly humane one. Twenty succinct and thought-provoking chapters deal with topics of essential interest to us all today, including the role of rationality and irrationality, apathy and aggressiveness, the abdication of art, the mass media, virtual reality and escapism, youth's own particular vision, and a dozen or so other equally vital issues. Ivan Klima was born in 1931 in Prague. He spent over three years in a Nazi concentration camp as a child. From 1970 he was blacklisted by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, and could only publish abroad. He was deeply involved in the Velvet Revolution of 1989 with other dissident writers such as Vaclav Havel. His books and plays have been translated into 30 languages, and among his latest English translations are THE SPIRIT OF PRAGUE, a collection of essays, and the novel THE ULTIMATE INTIMACY. As a visiting professor, he has lectured at the University of Michigan (1969-70), and the University of California, Berkeley (1997). inventory #15426.…