BiblioVault - Books about Turner, Gerald

Architects of Long Change

The Expert Roots of Post-Socialism in Czechoslovakia (1980–1995)

Edited by Michal Kopecek

Karolinum Press, 2026

A thorough retort to the idea that the West led the transition from communism to liberal democracy.

Architects of Long Change examines expert forms of governance and their legitimization before 1989, as well as the transfer of expert knowledge and practices of political and social management during the democratic transition. The contributors argue that so-called neoliberal governance was not solely the result of imported Western political and cultural models, but was also shaped by intellectual, mental, and sociocultural continuities from the period of late socialism. These continuities—and the broader hypothesis of a “long systemic change” spanning from 1980 to 1995—are explored through case studies in legal science, sociology, urban planning, environmental studies, psychotherapy, and business management.

Architects of Long Change offers a novel perspective on the late communist dictatorship, the democratic revolution of 1989, and the early development of liberal democracy and capitalism in Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic.

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A Czech Dreambook

Ludvík Vaculík

Karolinum Press, 2018

It’s 1979 in Communist Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing period known as normalization, and Ludvík Vaculík has writer’s block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his powerful novel, The Guinea Pigs, and it was in 1968 that he wrote his anti-regime manifesto, Two Thousand Words, which the Soviet Union used as a pretext for invading Czechoslovakia. On the advice of his friend, the poet and surrealist painter Jiří Kolář, Vaculík begins to keep a diary, “a book about things, people, and events.” This marks the beginning of A Czech Dreambook.

Fifty-four weeks later, what Vaculík turns out to have written is a unique mixture of diary, dream journal, and outright fiction—an inverted roman à clef in which the author, his family, his mistresses, and the real leaders of the Czech underground play major roles. Undisputedly the most debated novel among the Prague dissident community of the 1980s, it is a work that Vaculík himself described as an amalgam of “hard-boiled documentary” and “magic fiction,” while Václav Havel called it “a truly profound and perceptive account. . . . A great novel about modern life and the crisis of contemporary humanity.”

A Czech Dreambook has been hailed as the most important work of Czech literature in the past forty years. And yet it has never before been available in English. Flawlessly translated by Gerald Turner, Vaculík’s masterpiece is a brilliant exercise in style, dry humor, and irony—an important portrait of the lives and longings of the dissidents and post-Communist elites.

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The Restoration of Order

The Normalization of Czechoslovakia 1969–1976

Milan Šimecka

Karolinum Press, 2025

This collection of Cold War essays and reflections enthralls any reader seeking a pointed dissection of the Soviet style of government and thinking.

In an engaging style, not lacking in irony and detachment, Milan Šimečka describes the process of restoring order and its result—so-called real socialism—in a brilliant analysis of the “normalization” regime in Czechoslovakia that came to power after the Soviet-led invasion that crushed the Prague Spring of 1968. These poignant reflections and essays coincided with Šimečka’s first-hand experience of the consequences of the time’s political and cultural purges.

This second edition of Cold War classics, first written between 1975 and 1977, with a new preface from Martin Šimečka and afterword from Jonathan Bolton, highlights chilling parallels with contemporary political developments and current civic and ethical questions.

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T. G. Masaryk and the Jewish Question

Miloš Pojar

Karolinum Press, 2018

In this book, Miloš Pojar traces the development and transformation of the opinions about Jews and Judaism of the first Czechoslovak president, T. G. Masaryk. Pojar describes the key events and ideas that shaped Masaryk’s attitudes: his first contacts with the Jewish world as a child, and later as a student; his work as a philosopher and sociologist, through which his thinking on Marxism, social issues, Christianity, and Judaism evolved; and his later, pivotal, experience at the time of the anti-Semitic libel trials against Leopold Hilsner, known as the Hilsner Affair. Pojar also details the period when Masaryk, as president, formulated his position on matters such as the Czech-Jewish movement, the question of assimilation, and Zionism. Featuring an entire chapter on Masaryk’s celebrated 1927 trip to Palestine as well as a series of brief profiles of outstanding Jewish figures that explore both Masaryk’s attitudes to their ideas and their opinions of Masaryk, this book is a compelling personal portrait and a substantial contribution to our understanding of the history of Jews in the Czech lands.

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The Urban Condition

Olivier Mongin

Karolinum Press, 2016

The first installment in Karolinum’s new Václav Havel Series—which aims to continue the philosophical discourse of that thinker, playwright, dissident, and president—this book asks whether it will be possible to reestablish urban spaces that are in tune with our times. By recalling the distinctive elements that comprise the urban experience, Olivier Mongin lays the basis for reflection on the contemporary urban condition. We live in an epoch in which information exchange takes place according to flows rather than in locations, in which globalization has thrust us into a post-city, post-urban world.

In the past, we were accustomed to seeing the city as a circumscribed space, the setting for cultural, social, and political life that enabled the civic integration of individuals. Now we find ourselves confronted by both seemingly limitless, gigantic megalopolises and the emergence of global networks of entities cut off from a physical environment. The current reconfiguration is cause for concern: Are we witnessing the terminal decline of the urban values that have been a concomitant part of recent human history? Will fragmentation and chaotic urban sprawl inevitably prevail? Are we doomed to lament the lost legacies of the Greek polis, the Renaissance city, Enlightenment Paris, and the great industrial cities of the nineteenth century?

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Vendulka

Flight to Freedom

Ondrej Kundra

Karolinum Press, 2021

So many lives were cut short by the Holocaust, many with no trace to leave behind for future generations to remember. Vendulka tells the story of a single scrap of remembrance—a candid photograph taken in the midst of this unspeakable tragedy—and that artifact’s amazing aftermath.

Famed Czech photographer Jan Lukas snapped an offhand portrait of twelve-year-old Vendulka Vogl in March 1943. A friend of the Vogls, Lukas was saying goodbye to the family, who were soon to leave Prague for a concentration camp. The photograph almost didn’t see the light of day—Lukas knew that if the Nazis found it on him, he could wind up in the camps as well—but the image was eventually developed and came to symbolize the Holocaust and humanize its victims. Seventy years after this famous picture was taken, investigative journalist Ondřej Kundra discovered that, despite all odds, Vendulka Vogl had survived the camps of Terezín, Auschwitz, and Christianstadt, and was in fact still alive and living in the United States. Kundra persuaded her to tell the remarkable story surrounding the photograph: her survival, her later decision to flee the Communist regime for America, and how she later reconnected with Jan Lukas, maintaining a lifelong friendship.

Vogl’s thrillingly moving story, Kundra’s sharp and engaging writing, and Lukas’s striking photography all combine to make Vendulka an inspiring investigation into the horrors of totalitarianism and the redemptive beauty of friendship.

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