Commies, Crooks, Gypsies, Spooks & Poets: Thirteen Books of Prague in the Year of the Great Lice Epidemic by Jan Novak (1995, Hardcover)

Synopsis
Twelve books of Prague in the year of the great lice epidemic. A detailed--almost nit-picking--account of this acclaimed Czech-American author's year-long stay with his wife and two children in his homeland immediately following the fall of Communism. An intimate portrait of Eastern Europe told with a native's ease and a Westerner's eye with rare glimpses of daily life in the Czech Republic and insights into the tragic war in the former Yugoslavia.

Key Details
Author:	Jan Novak
Language:	English
Publisher:	Steerforth Pr
Format:	Hardcover
ISBN-10:	1883642094
ISBN-13:	9781883642099

Size
Height:	9 in
Width:	6 in
Thickness:	1 in
Weight:	15.2 oz

Publisher's Note
Journeying from Chicago for a year's stay in his Czech homeland, the author and his wife and two children live high and low amidst Prague's ancient glory and modern confusion, and Novak moves through Eastern Europe with a native's ease and a westerner's eye. His vivid accounts of daily life in the Czech Republic and of the tragic war unfolding next door in the former Yugoslavia are at once highly personal, raucous, comic, painful, and memorable. Novak ties his book together with personal accounts of fighting for oranges as a child in the Stalinist fifties, of getting beaten up by state security officers as a teenager in the sixties, of being expelled from his homeland "forever" in the seventies, and finally of passing on a sense of ethnic heritage to his American children.

Industry Reviews
"This raucous account of their year-long stay is the equivalent of a pub conversation with an affable stranger that becomes an all-night marathon of beer-fueled wisdom."
Washington Post

"...a curio cabinet of a book, exuberant, and untidy. full of small marvels that glow in the memory....When Mr. Novak writes well, he soars. You don't need to know or care about Prague to be elated by his odd eye."
New York Times Book Review - Brian Hall (06/25/1995)