- Published: 7 February 2013
- ISBN: 9781448150182
- Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 384
The Taste of Ashes
- Published: 7 February 2013
- ISBN: 9781448150182
- Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 384
Gripping…[Shore] describes her travels and expresses her feelings so openly and engagingly.
Standpoint
Her fine book is a very personal account of the people that she came to know in eastern Europe after the end of Soviet domination in 1989… The novelty of Shore’s approach lies in her focus on the families of Poland’s Stalinists.
Financial Times
[A] brilliant and perceptive book about a part of the world, as [Shore] explains, ‘where the past is palpable and heavy’ ... part memoir, part reportage, a treatise on the philosophy of history, and part romance written with lyrical beauty in places…there’s an interesting and original idea on almost every page.
Spectator
Part-memoir, part-intellectual history, Shore’s book follows her journey into the heart of the Polish and Czech intelligentsia, exploring their reactions to and involvement in the Holocaust, the purges and the revolutions that dominate 20th century Eastern European history….poignant and thought-provoking.
Sunday Times
[Shore’s] kaleidoscope book of reminiscences and encounters gives an authentic feel to the difficulties that outsiders often have in making sense of this intricate history…Ms Shore…does an excellent job of bringing to life the still rancorous relations between Jews of rival persuasions.
The Economist
Beautifully written, brilliantly perceptive and often moving… With the opening of the archives, many excellent histories of communist eastern Europe have appeared in recent years… but I cannot think of any that succeed so well as this. In combining subtle historical judgements with literary flair, Shore has produced a masterpiece.
BBC History Magazine
Shore … writes first rate reportage in these cool-eyed but warm-hearted dispatches from the former Soviet bloc.
Independent
Shore is attentive to the ethnic strife unleashed by the ‘Pandora’s Box’ of one-party dictatorship as well as to the sinister propaganda of fundamentalist Christians.
Scotsman
Marci Shore has written a one-of-a-kind book - a personal, intellectual, literary and historical tour of contemporary Central Europe - with something in it for everyone who wants to understand this fascinating part of the world.
Anne Applebaum, author of Iron Curtain and Gulag
The Taste of Ashes is about more than the floodwaters of history; it's the story of those who learned to swim, those who didn't, and those still adapting to an era of accelerated change. This is a brilliant, lyrical and gripping book, one woven from stories that will linger in the minds of readers for years to come.
Ian Bremmer, author of The End of the Free Market
With deep respect for what the historian can and cannot know and what the witness can and cannot share, Marci Shore has achieved something rare: a narrative history that is also a philosophy of history. Her subject is Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Stalinism, but her stories of people and places - tragic, ironic, carnavalesque - have a universal appeal.
Alice Kaplan, author of Dreaming in French