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Dancing Bears

True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life under Tyranny

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

For hundreds of years, Bulgarian Gypsies trained bears to dance, welcoming them into their families and taking them on the road to perform. In the early 2000s, with the fall of Communism, they were forced to release the bears into a wildlife refuge. But even today, whenever the bears see a human, they still get up on their hind legs to dance.

In the tradition of Ryszard Kapuściński, award-winning Polish journalist, Witold Szabłowski uncovers remarkable stories of people throughout Eastern Europe and in Cuba who, like Bulgaria's dancing bears, are now free but who seem nostalgic for the time when they were not. His on-the-ground accounts provide a fascinating portrait of social and economic upheaval and a lesson in the challenges of freedom and the seductions of authoritarian rule.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 11, 2017
      Polish journalist Szabłowski (The Assassin from April) gives a sharply drawn account of people in “newly free societies” who long for life to be the same as it was in the unfree past. His title derives from the centuries-old practice in Bulgaria of training bears to dance, a practice that was outlawed when the country joined the E.U. in 2007, forcing the release of the dancing bears into the wild. To this day, the bears miss their masters and dance for them whenever they are reunited. Szabłowski’s book comes in two parts, first telling a heartrending story of the bears and their keepers, then sketching individual profiles, mainly of Eastern Europeans unhappy with freedom and change. The voices include a Ukrainian priest who thinks the European Union is a satanic temptation and last-gasp Stalin worshippers in the Caucasus. Szabłowski ends with an unhappy Greek railing against German-imposed austerity and capitalism. Connected by the allegory of performing bears, Szabłowski’s melancholy personality studies underscore freedom’s challenges and the seductions of authoritarian rule. Agent: Magdalena Debowska, Polish Rights.

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  • English

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