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Title: Utopias Elsewhere: Journey's in a Vanishing World by Anthony Daniels ISBN: 0-517-58548-0 Publisher: Random House Inc Pub. Date: 01 September, 1991 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $19.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: "I don't get no kick from campaigns"
Comment: Although everyone can find Anthony Daniels' wit entertaining and his observations keen, the overwhelming emotion created by this book is depression. How many people have spent their lives suffocating under awful regimes composed of banal torturers and Kafkaesque bureaucrats of no imagination ? (with apologies to Kafka) UTOPIAS ELSEWHERE is a series of articles written on five countries where Communism was about to disappear as a way of life, or at least, it seemed that way in 1989-90. In Albania and Romania, the author was probably among the last writers to attempt description of the obscene systems of government that held power there-totalitarian Balkan dictatorships with a Marxist frosting. In Vietnam, the government was in the process of change, and in the two last, North Korea and Cuba, the melting process has at last begun, albeit a decade later. Daniels, with an average of about two weeks' stay in each place, puts his finger precisely on what makes these places so awful, despite the fact that a lot of Western intellectuals, none of whom actually settled there, praised these places. [recall for example the Swedish couple, Myrdal and Kessle, and their unbelievably naive book, "Albania Defiant"] Daniels is able to describe the worst aspects of these so-called "worker paradises" very succinctly. Comments about everything, from ugly,grandiose architecture to triumphalist propaganda, hit the mark. The author often casts doubt on his own opinions, makes you consider whether he has been entirely objective or not. I thought he did not consider well enough the fate of millions of poor people trapped in horrible privations in many Third World countries. For such people, without electricity, clean water, schools, or health care---living maybe inside a cement pipe---under constant threat of petty harrassment or brutal intimidation from 'local authorities', perhaps Cuba or Vietnam would not have seemed so terrible. Am I one of those dreaded "apologists" for tyrannical regimes of the left ? No, I've lived in India for five years. When it comes to North Korea or Hoxha's Albania, however, it is really debatable whether becoming a virtual automaton and slave of the state (and still starving) is still better than abject poverty and exploitation. Is life at all worth living under megalomaniacs like Kim Il-sung ? People may indeed think that they are already dead when they are still walking around. When Daniels describes an entire Potemkin department store in Pyongyang, fake customers and all, you have to agree with him that North Korea managed to "out-Orwell Orwell". Romania under Ceaucescu, which I saw some 11 years before Daniels, was, as he correctly describes it, a kleptocracy with fascist trappings and Marxist vocabulary ruled by a modern Dracula: nobody believed in anything. While Daniels noted the similarities of all five would-be utopias, he did not note their differences so clearly. If you're aware of these differences, they do appear in his writing, but he takes no pains to underline them. This is the major fault in a very interesting (but sad) book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Tyranny in the far corners of the world
Comment: What struck me most about this book was the numbing similarities between the plight of the people in the stricken lands visited by the author. Tyranny is not a very original or creative form of government, and must resort the same horrors wherever it appears around the world. A very insightful and entertaining book. Read it.
Rating: 5
Summary: With a psychiatrist like this...
Comment: Anthony Daniels is a very funny writer in some of the very saddest places on earth. All right, perhaps he is biased, but he is biased the way a psychiatrist is supposed to be---he's biased toward the pursuit of happiness. The most tragic moment is in Romania, where two engineers tell him privately, "We are dead already," referring to the nature of their meaningless lives. I wonder if he'll go back and report again on these places?
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Title: Anti-Americanism by Jean Francois Revel, DIARMID CAMMELL ISBN: 1893554856 Publisher: Encounter Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-Hwan, Pierre Rigoulot, Yair Reiner ISBN: 0465011020 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 03 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Art: A New History by Paul Johnson ISBN: 0060530758 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 30 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: How democracies perish by Jean François Revel ISBN: 0385191200 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 1984 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study by Thomas Sowell ISBN: 0300101996 Publisher: Yale University Press Pub. Date: 10 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
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