Chernobyl Strawberries: A Memoir

click here for more details, find new or used items	Vesna Goldsworthy Our price £9.89 (£14.99) New from £7.50 Used from £1.99 Pages: 290 (Hardcover) ISBN: 1843544148 Pub: Atlantic Books Pub date: 2005-03-10 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 249201

Reader Reviews:

Interesting but flawed memoir of a Yugoslav in London (7/10 people found this helpful)

The author of this memoir has certainly had an interesting life. The privations of growing up inside the Communist bloc - although covered elsewhere equally well - make colourful reading, and one feels for her having to witness the country of her birth tearing itself apart. Equally, it is hard not to sympathise with someone coping with a breast cancer diagnosis. All that said, I do think both the content and style of the book suffer thanks to the relatively privileged perspective of the author - at least by comparison with most of her countrymen. She was a well known radio personality in Yugoslavia, apparently, and a much loved poet to boot. She married an Englishman and went to England (the preferred avenue to a better life for many Eastern bloc women, even now), landing a rather plumb job at the BBC, before moving on to a senior post in Academia. The book works best when it is most down-to-earth and journalistic. It is less successsful when self-consciously literary and poetic, or when trying to lend its reflections great cultural significance, whcih it does form time-to-time. Eva Hoffman's memoir "Lost in Translation" - the author was a Pole who eventually left Poland for Canada - did it rather better, even though she too was a bit of an academic. That said, "Chernobyl Strawberries" is still very much worth investgating.

Poetry (5/8 people found this helpful)

An utterly beautiful book. Much of the prose is almost poetry - often phraseology expresses something that has passed across the mind but never made itself known. As you may gather, it's highly recommended!

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