As a four-year old, Monica Halasz (now Porter) didn't remember much of her homeland after her family fled after the 1956 abortive revolution. Here, with only a month allotted, she manages to combine a travelogue with her own encounters with her relatives and family friends willing to meet with her. Others do not. You feel the tension living in a communist regime here, even one as relatively more open (1980) than others, and I wondered how much of her story she had to leave out for fear of offending those whose conversations she could not have retold at the time of her book.

She conveys her journey in a surprisingly well-written account that often relies upon analogy and metaphor. She builds into her visit an examination of the refugee and the stateless condition--why can some adapt and others never can, once removed from their place of birth, she asks herself and other Hungarians she knows from England, where she now lives after a New York childhood.

Worthwhile for its thoughtful and evocative analysis. A month usually gives little raw material for a sustained report, but combining her travel with her own recollections and other exile accounts, Porter constructs a non-sentimental, honest, and revealing picture that opens up herself as well as Hungary to the reader.

This book's contents is a lot more solid and a lot less presumptious than its title. The author, thankfully, does not pretend to "understand modern Hungary" through the lives of three families. She does, however, do a good job in exploring the social and, to an extent, economic history of a small town in the Great Hungarian Plains. A reader's interest and curiosity are nicely piqued by installments of family histories -- marriages, children, house building -- which successfully sustained me through tables of income statistics and descriptions of numerous land reforms. I would have wished to see more clear differentiation between author's comments and the views expressed by her interview subjects. As it is, I was occasionally frustrated by being unable to tell the difference, and feeling deprived of a clear insight into the families' views and perceptions.
The book is written in a strongly narrative style, steady-paced and slightly boring in the middle sections, but picking up speed and vibrancy as the author moves into the events of the 1980s. All in all, it is a solid work, and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in social history, particularly of Eastern Europe.

Sent Forth a Dove provides an insight into the first European ship recorded in history to visit Australia and the work by a team of people in Fremantle, Australia to build a replica of the ship. This book brings together little known parts of the Duyfken story, including background history of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). A good read for students of maritime history, shipbuilding and the Aboriginal history of Australia.

Barber does a good job of covering the Hungarian uprising of 1956. He covers events both inside the capital Budapest and the
outlying countryside. Also acknowledged is the internal power struggle between the various Communist factions prior to the uprising. I found the explanation of the politics of Nagy, Gero, and Kadar good. One thing not covered in detail was the Stalinist legacy left by Rakosi. The book should have detailed both Rakosi and Horthy's legacy in Hungary, and why it led to the Revolution.
Book was well written using both what Barber witnessed and other external sources. Probably one of the better summaries of the Hungarian uprising.

When you see the title and subtitle, you might expect an unrelentingly grim report--so unfortunately familiar from the genre of accounts by Holocaust survivors. Instead, after reading Erno Szep's story a few weeks spent digging trenches in a slave labor camp, you close the book not weary of a cheerless tale, but wishing you could have found out more--especially after Szep returned to Budapest just in time for the Soviet siege and the Nazi/Arrow Cross defense. In a series of very brief episodes, he relates with all the detail he can bear his view of the Jews in Budapest as most of its "able" men first were rounded up, then sent off to work under the sneers and beatings of the Arrow Cross. He conveys vividly the feel of forced labor and little food, the monotony, the damp, and the hunger increasing as their supplies and energy dwindle and the toil takes its toll.

Unlike some other Hungarian translations of texts, this one by John Batki, a scholar who left Hungary as a teenager, manages to render into very colloquial but never casual English what must be marvelous Magyar prose. Szep's style evidently is cosmopolitan, with a snap and joie de vivre that persists despite his subject matter. Imagine a less taciturn, more convivial counterpart to Primo Levi. My only withholding of a fifth star in the rating: a stereotypically verbose and clumsily experimental preface by Dezso Tandori that reminds me of the worst of translated Hungarian stylists too enamoured of their own cleverness to remember their reader's attention span. Stick with Szep's own "autobiographical statement" and Batki's remarks. How I wish Szep had written much more! (1884-1953)

Parts of his story shed new light on old events: the process by which were extended, denied, and re-extended passes by the Swedish (although Raoul Wallenberg's not mentioned by name--perhaps postwar Hungarian censorship may have been a factor?) and Spanish embassies; the fate of those who had grown up entirely Christian by birth and belief but had Jewish grandparents; the more recent converts hoping the excape the yellow star; and the printers. In this last vignette, Szep wonders why that largely socialist union, in WWI, allowed its members to produce so much propaganda for the capitalists. If they had simply refused to print the disortions of the ruling class, Szep muses, perhaps war would have been averted. Hmmm.

With his book entitled "Stereotypes During the Decline and Fall of Communism," György Hunyady of the Eötvös Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary has provided us with a rare glimpse into the psychological dynamics that accompany grand-scale sweeping historical changes of the kind that we have witnessed in Eastern Europe over the past decade. This is a particularly valuable contribution to those of us in English-speaking countries who have not had access to the primary research on which this book is based. In short, what Hunyady has produced is an extremely useful and impressive piece of work.

Hunyady's book proceeds from a theoretical assumption that serves to unite social psychology and political science, namely that "ideologies live in the form of stereotypes in public thinking" (p. 19). Thus, he catalogues for us, over a thirty-year period, the stereotypical beliefs that Hungarians have held about a vast number of politically relevant target groups, including all of the following: Russians, Germans, Americans, Romanians, Poles, French, British, Chinese, Serbs, Slovaks, Gypsies, Jews, workers, intellectuals, peasants, capitalists, clerical workers, students, bankers, teachers, soldiers, and on and on. What Hunyady has left us, for the historical record, is nothing less than a complete description, over time, of the full range and contents of social categories used by Hungarians before, during, and after one of the most consequential periods of world history in the 20th century.

Following qualitative methods advocated by William J. McGuire (1973, 1983; McGuire & McGuire, 1991), Hunyady has also recorded the mental associations that children and adults have to such fundamental political concepts as: nation, country, patriotism, immigration, social class, occupational status, social development, and historical change. Here again, the usefulness of these descriptions cannot be over-stated. I know of no other work in social psychology that provides us with such a historically-situated, politically relevant data base with which to examine the contents, structures, and functions of attitudes, beliefs, representations, and thought systems concerning the social and political world.

Hunyady offers deeply insightful historical analyses, in an almost offhand way:

"It was the strength and weakness of the socialism of the communists that it was simultaneously a system of ideas and a political movement, then a political system and even a world power. The two roles both strengthen and fetter each other. It must be a remarkable system of ideas if it can grip the masses and transform the world, but it is bound to lose its idealistic purity as it collects the historical deposits of wrong-doing, troubles, and failure. It is high-quality politics if it expresses its aims and principles through the promise of philosophical depth ripened by historical experience, but it will lose its reason and efficiency if it tries to do violence to real social relationships by clinging to outdated abstractions" (p. 28).

The subtlety of Hunyady's thought draws out, dialectically, the paradoxical potency and impotency of ideology, the ways in which only the development of a shared reality can inspire us to shift political contours en masse and how quickly that shared belief system becomes passé and a magnet for cynicism, disappointment, and ridicule.

Despite Hunyady's reticence to make causal claims, there are at least three important sets of findings that provide those of us with a more speculative bent the opportunity to theorize. These have to do with: (a) the psychological transfer of allegiance from communism to capitalism, (b) the tendency to believe that poorer peoples and countries are happier and friendlier, and (c) the desire to view historical developments in terms of progress and improvement. Hunyady has inspired me to think some about each of these (see my review in "Contemporary Psychology").

Those of us in social psychology who share György Hunyady's love of history, politics, and culture should be grateful to him for providing us with such fascinating portrait of Hungarian national consciousness. The book provides valuable stimulus material as we strive to understand further the individual's experience of social and historical change all around us. Although the book is focused on the Hungarian context, as well it should be to preserve historical specificity and cultural embeddedness, the themes he raises concerning psychology and politics are universal and transcendent. What the future holds, no one knows. But one thing is sure: we will adapt.

This short book packs a strong punch -- particularly in the first half as the author relates her memories of being a young Jewish girl in Budapest between 1941 and 1945. As the situation becomes more oppressive after the German occupation in 1944, each incident becomes progressively more vivid. This portion of the book culminates in the end of the German occupation and the beginning of the Soviet period of influence.

Unfortunately, the second half of the book slows down a bit as the author relates additional stories around her early professional career as a state-sponsored (by the Communist government) musician. The book feels oddly incomplete - ...

Hard to put down. Makes you always want to know what's going to happen next. You feel as though you were there.

The author traces the history of the Jewish Community of Vienna. This is a well written history that captures the reader like a novel. Once started it is hard to put it down. The author traces the history of the Jews of Vienna from a vibrant cultural society to a persecuted victim of the Austrian Nazis. His analysis of the Vienna population and there participation in the Holocaust is a story that is not often told. The author contrasts the Austrian response to Nazism with that of the German populace at large.

This book is a follow-up to Janik and Toulmin's earlier study, "Wittgenstein's Vienna". Unlike the earlier book, this book consists of a series of essays which are loosely connected by some transitional passages and melded into a book. In spite of its somewhat patchwork character, this book is a good study of Vienna and the influence of its writers, psychologists, and composers on Wittgenstein. A major goal of the book is to place Wittgenstein's thought in the context of European culture and thought rather than seeimg him solely within the context of the English (and American) analytical philosophy which he influenced profoundly.

Of the twelve chapters in the book, the first six have little to do with an analysis of Wittgenstein's thought. Rather they consist of expositions of certain turn-of-the century Viennese thinkers. Chief of these, and probably the most fascinating figure in the book is Otto Weininger who wrote a book called "Sex and Character" at the age of 23 just before his suicide. Weininger is known as an influence on Wittgenstein. He is also remembered, when he is thought of at all, for his anti-feminism and anti-semitism. Janik attempts to capture something of the complexity of Weininger's thought by placing him in the Kantian tradition and as a practitioner of what Janik terms "critical modernism."

There are also good discussions in the first half of the book of Arnold Schoenberg and, surprisingly to me Jacques Offenbach. These composers are juxtaposed with Weininger for their critical, deflatonary tendency in art and thought. They are presented as challenging the tendencies of turn-of-century Vienna towards an entertainment, theatrical culture -- shades of the present.

The second half of the book deals more directly with Wittgenstein. It discusses the thought of the logical positivists, of the philosopher of science Hertz, the satirist Karl Kraus (the focus of the earlier "Wittgenstein's Vienna), Freud, and the Viennese poet Trakl. Here again, Janik does not analyze Wittgenstein's thought in detail. Instead, he takes certain broad themes suggested by Wittgenstein such as the distinction between saying and showing, "the mystical", the nature of religous experience, and the living of the everyday and shows possible sources of these themes in the thinkers he examines. The material is interesting and valuable, probably more for the light it casts on the thinkers Janik discusses than for the light it casts on Wittgenstein.

This is a good, difficult book about an important creative period in the early 20th Century and about an important and difficult 20th Century philosopher.