This book is an outstanding study of the causes of political developments in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. It is certainly one of the best academic books availible on the Central and Eastern Europe. Clearly written and packed with relevant information. Highly reccommended!

This book is a true account of the people who were exiled because they were Jewish and persecuted by the Nazis.It is a sincere description of biographical accounts. The introduction to the book is written with understanding and feelings by the editor, Adi Wimmer. The book is divided into three sections each one reflecting a different attitude toward the return to Austria. The experiences of the exiles are clearly described.

Rarely does a book capture the true essence of a period in the history of our world through the life of a great man.

I have just finished reading The Time of the Gypsies with great interest. I lived in Hungary for two years and my knowledge of the Hungarian Gypsies (Rom) was based entirely on a Magyar perspective. After returning to the US I read Angus Fraser's book The Gypsies, which was a good introduction to contemporary Western scholarship concerning the Rom.

What Fraser's book left out was an understanding of how the Rom viewed themselves and how their self-concept was defined. The present volume fills that gap. It has caused me to consider the varying viewpoints of Magyars and Rom and how conflicting viewpoints lead to radically different interpretations of the economic and social activities of the Rom. Many stories I heard from Magyars now "make sense" because I can see what the other side of the story was.

The Time of the Gypsies does an excellent job of showing the very real roots of conflicts between Rom and other people without either vilifying or romanticising either side. Although not aimed at mending the rifts between the Rom and non-Rom the book does an excellent job of promoting the mutual understanding and recognition that is needed to prevent further discord.

This is az amazing book about an interesting period of Hungarian history. In my view, if you'd like to know an era, the best thing to do is to check out its newspapers and magazines, and this is exactly what this book provides you with. Tons of funny/ridiculous/incredible (depending on your political attitude) pictures and clips of articles. Being Hungarian, I might have a different view on these things than non-Hungarians, but I'm too young to remember most of this era. If you'd like to know how people could actually _live_ in an oppressive socialist state without any personal freedom, this book is the one to read. It tells you a lot in an amusing way about this sad & sweet period of Hungarian history.

This excellent study traces Hungary's underground music scence from the time when music functioned as the best available substitute for politics on to the present, when no-longer-underground artists are competing over accounts for the past, the kind of cultural capital they feel their past engagement entitles them to, and a new set of opponents not in the sometimes censorious state but in the multinational music industry. Anna Szemere brings in a nuanced knowledge not only of the postsocialist transformation, but also of aesthetic and sociological theory, to make for a discussion that has implications well beyond Hungary and Eastern Europe. Also, she makes a lot of fascinating lyrics available to non-Hungarian speakers.

628 pages and 45 Chapters (not including an Introduction and Epilogue) comprise David Irving's masterful history of the doomed 1956 Hungarian Uprising entitled "Uprising! One Nation's Nightmare: Hungary 1956" (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1981). It is unfortunate that the book is currently unavailable because it is a work of merit and value. It is the only concise and definitive English history of this doomed rebellion. It is also unique because it is David Irving's only book that does not deal with the Second World War.

The full story of the revolt that temporarily drove Communism out of Hungary between 24 October and 4 November 1956 has never been told. This book is an exhaustive, full account of this event that was so quickly forgotten outside of Hungary, owing especially to the Suez Crisis that coincided with the revolt (and also because the United States was keen in covering up their tracks, as they wished to incite revolt in the Soviet Bloc, but did nothing about it once the opportunity to act presented itself). Irving recounts in painstaking detail the history of Hungary following 1945, when Communism, with the help of the Soviets, became the ruling force in Hungary, employing a secret police, the AVH (Allam Vedelmi Hatosag). He tells the story of Matthias Rákosi, a brutal Stalinist dictator that turned the country into a "pit of Marxist misery" until a more liberal Communist named Imre Nagy replaced him, who would eventually become Prime Minister during the uprising. For his liberal acts and views, such as the abolishment of collectivization of agriculture, Nagy was replaced in 1953 by a no better leader named Ernest Gero who, like Rákosi, was a hard-line Stalinist and Jewish. Those crucial years, Irving argues, were highly important, for they provided Hungarians a textbook-perfect premise, from which an uprising could grow and explode.

From there, Irving writes an hour-by-hour (and sometimes minute-by-minute), day-by-day account of the uprising that turned Hungary from being ruled by party functionaries, or "funkies," as Irving calls them (adapting this from the Hungarian word 'funkcionáriusók') to the mob of rebels that often took law into their own hands, turning their years of loss and anguish against the powerless funkies and hated AVH (lynching and shootings were an almost daily occurrence, as Irving illustrates). Of course, on the early morning of November 4, Soviet forces shattered the idea that the rebels had won against the USSR, a country of 200,000,000 by smashing the uprising and defeating key rebel strongholds, and forever scarred the ancient and beautiful city of Budapest (the reviewer once visited the city, shortly after Communism there collapsed). Irving then concludes his work by discussing what happened to many of the key players in the uprising; it was a uniform procedure, Irving surmises: they were all "tricked, kidnapped, deported, hanged" in the Communist fashion (see Chapter 45).

Irving analyzes the uprising through very strong research; he has an excellent eye for details and truths overlooked by previous researchers. The vast majority of his evidence comes from primary sources, many of them in the original Hungarian. His assessment of the Prime Minister during the uprising, Imre Nagy, indeed does raise eyebrows, as Irving predicts in his Introduction. Nagy was not exactly the innocent liberal that he has been portrayed; he remained a devoted Communist all through his life, spent most of his years in Moscow, and only practiced his liberal politics during the uprising because he feared the fate accorded to most die-hard funkies: the firing squad or being lynched. Consequently, toward the end of the uprising, he accorded the rebels more and more recognition and fulfilled their demands. It was also his death-knell, as he was eventually deported to Romania, then brought back to Hungary in 1958, where he faced trial and execution with others involved in his "conspiracy." Anti-Semitism itself played a decisive role in the uprising, as most of the high-ranking funkies and AVH officials were Jewish, such as both Rákosi and Gero (this is backed by CIA documents and the words of the Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, as well as the accounts of several hundreds of survivors that escaped from Hungary while they could).

Irving also discusses the decisive roles of the Central Intelligence Agency (the CIA) as well as Radio Free Europe (RFE) in stirring agitation in the Soviet Bloc countries as early as 1953. The later conduct of these American organizations was in complete contradiction, as the UN and NATO did nothing to aid the Hungarian cause when the opportunity presented itself. The American players in this tragedy, notably President Dwight Eisenhower, CIA chief Allen W. Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, are all discussed. Irving also takes care in describing the horrific deceitfulness and hypocrisy of the Party funkies, both Russian and Hungarian.

Though his book touches on several themes, Irving's central thesis is that the whole event was an uprising, an insurrection, not a revolution (yet the event is still commonly called the "Hungarian Revolution"), as it was spontaneous and leaderless. Ironically enough, it was the workers and peasants, allegedly the ones forming the framework of Marxist theory, who were at the forefront of the uprising, as well as many card-carrying Communist Party members. Irving has wonderfully demonstrated what can comprise a major upheaval within a repressive empire and just how the rage of a country of only 10,000,000 can explode. An amazing book that reads like a thriller; it places you on the streets of Budapest among the rebels, wielding aging rifles and tommy-guns, Molotov cocktails and grenades, blowing up Soviet tanks with bare hands.

This first person account of Nazi evil is unbelievable, gut-wrenching. How one man can endure so much injustice and still retain his defiant spirit is mind-boggling. I was entranced from beginning to end.

Imagine, you are a 14 yr old girl growing up in a small, rural Hungarian town... surrounded by your loved ones. Slowly, hatred is surrounding you and all your friends and relatives are taken away to a death camp--Auschwitz. You survive alone among your family and come back to your "home". Your neighbors, who looted your furniture, resent your coming back. Your family is gone. Their business is gone...but your memories keep bringing you back. After you are a grown woman, a grandmother, you get a degree in history and write a book of your little town. You still search for the answer to the question-- WHY? Dr. Stessel wrote a moving history of her little town. Life was idyllic and life was cut short. The groping for the details tells many stories.

I first picked up this story at the library and read it to my oldest daughter (now 12) when she was just 3 years old. Now 9 years, many checkouts from the library and 3 more children later I've decided after all this time, I have to add it to our home bookshelf.

It is a story that reminds us all not to judge people by the way they look, but by their knowledge of life and contents of their hearts. I've taken this book into my children's schools and read it to their classmates and the teachers always say they will be adding it to their bookshelves as well. Although this book is a Jewish tale, it's a must for everyone of every faith.