The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History

Rating:
Summary: A Czech "Cultural" History
Review: A previous reviewer is right--this is not a Czech history. But it is the history of how Czech culture has been formed. For that, it is fascinating--For a straight history, look elsewhere. If you are travelling to Prague, it will make many sites much richer--Vysehrad cemetery, the National Theatre, Old Town Square.

Rating:
Summary: A Czech "Cultural" History
Review: A previous reviewer is right--this is not a Czech history. But it is the history of how Czech culture has been formed. For that, it is fascinating--For a straight history, look elsewhere. If you are travelling to Prague, it will make many sites much richer--Vysehrad cemetery, the National Theatre, Old Town Square.

Rating:
Summary: A Bright but Isolated Star
Review: In The Coasts of Bohemia, Derek Sayers tells us how social values are invented and reinterpreted by those with the will and the power to do so, a study of Bohemian history with broader applications. He writes to clarify and contextualize social movements in the Czech lands from before the Hussites to the modern period, but the reader learns late in the book that his passion owes something to the cooperative assistance of his wife, whose father was a professor lost to the world of learning when he was removed by the Nazis as they closed the universities in Czechoslovakia in the 40s.
The book is a bright but isolated star in the realm of scholarship that explains the Czech lands and people to the citizens of the United States. Sayers has a firm grasp on the little things, "the quotidian," that make up cultural identity, but it is his writing style and his ability to weave small points into major themes that makes the book such a masterpiece.
I note with mixed feelings that Sayers works and teaches in Canada. The English-speaking world's gain; America's loss.

Rating:
Summary: Misleadingly titled
Review: The book's subtitle is "A Czech History," but people looking for a general history of the Czech lands will be disappointed. Sayer focuses not on battlefields and parliaments but on art, literature and historiography. He either completely ignores or barely mentions such topics as the world wars, the Munich Pact and the Communist coup while devoting dozens of pages to poets, artists and critics. Thus, despite the rather esoteric nature of Czech history, Sayer assumes readers already know the basics. I guess a title like "The Humanities and Czech Identity, 1620-1960" wouldn't sell as well.

Rating:
Summary: Another Rave for "Coasts"!
Review: This is a marvelous book. It is far and away the best single work available to English-speaking readers with an interest in Czech history and culture. It also more than merits the attention of anyone with an interest in Central Europe, the Western invention known as "Eastern Europe," European cultural history, or cultural history generally.

Sayer is quite convincing in making his major arguments: that the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia are rightly viewed as having stood for centuries at the center of European history; that Czech national identity, created virtually from scratch in the 19th century, exemplifies a complexly and authentically modern process of self-invention; and that the echoes, ironies, and reversals of Czech history hold valuable lessons for Westerners whose notions of "Eastern European" exoticism and backwardness are rivaled, in their ingenuousness, only by our belief in history as progress. He shows in vivid detail how history and historically derived notions of collective identity are refracted in the service of politics and power--and not only by totalitarian regimes. (In one of the book's most disturbingly persuasive sections, Sayer shows how Communism--far from being the wholly alien import that many Czechs would now prefer to see it as--took root in soil that had been well, if unwittingly, prepared by 150 years of often liberal Czech nationalist ideology.) Throughout "The Coasts of Bohemia," he provides a lavishly and (one comes to understand) lovingly detailed journey through the collective psyche of a fascinating nation--though Sayers' love for the Czechs and for Czech culture, we also come to suspect, is fiercely complicated and deeply ambivalent.

It should also be said that Sayers' book is just about a perfect model of what a scholarly book should be: massively detailed but carefully, even dramatically, shaped and organized; filled with concrete particulars but always letting the reader see their relation to the grand themes; stringen! tly reasoned but deeply felt; and extremely well written, illustrated, annotated, and indexed. In all, an extremely intelligent, learned, and sophisticated book that is also a great read.