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Maybe someday
37
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
40/100Critics
34/100Scholars
Author:
Rory MacLean
Publisher:
Bloomsbury Publishing
Date:
January 14, 2020
An acclaimed British travel writer takes the same journey across Europe he did in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. This time around, MacLean finds nascent democracy replaced by xenophobia, nationalism, and the advance of illiberalism.
What The Reviewers Say
Rory MacLean’s Pravda Ha Ha is...a triumph, made all the more commendable by its inherent challenges.
... gripping.
MacLean’s book is immensely readable. The history and politics of Eastern Europe are tackled here with humor and dry wit. MacLean is not writing a textbook but rather a series of richly detailed anecdotes about his experiences. This is perhaps the major fault of the book: MacLean assumes that his experiences of Eastern Europe are universal. His experience of Russia, for example, as solely corrupt and hopeless may not necessarily be fair to the people who actually make their lives there. However, this might also be a lesson of the book. Memory, MacLean suggests, goes a terribly long way to shape the way we view the world around us. In other words, memory becomes narrative, and narrative becomes the deciding factor in who writes history, and how. Pravda Ha Ha, in this way, is less a history of Eastern Europe than it is a history of Rory MacLean, and there are certainly worse histories you could read..
Readable and often grimly entertaining, Pravda Ha Ha demonstrates that Mr. MacLean has not lost his eye for absurdity...or a revealing detail. Yet Pravda Ha Ha has less of the subtlety that marked Mr. MacLean’s long-ago debut, a shortfall that extends into occasionally clumsy prose.
