Dancing Bears

Solid 3.5 stars.

This book caused a lot of questions about Communism, Capitalism, freedom, changes in government to cross my mind which I enjoyed immensely. This book is a great conversation starter. I would recommend going into this one knowing the structure of the book so you're not surprised by what you read. The first half/part of the book is about Bulgarian dancing bears that Gypsies in that region trained/forcibly domesticated to be “entertainment” as a form of occupation. After the Soviet Union collapsed, all of the these bears were collected and sent to a refuge to be introduced bit by bit to “freedom”. Hands down, this was my favorite section of the book because it was very well paced and executed; the sections had titles like ‘Love', ‘History', ‘Negotiation', that provided sufficient insights into how dancing bears as a practice came to be and how the Bulgarian Gypsies view these animals as a part of their families. (The pictures were weirdly placed in the direct center of the book so they're at the beginning of the second half which is a big departure from the first half. They were quite stunning though, emotionally.)

The second half of the book mimicked the first in the section titles but each one was about a different country that was impacted by the fall of Communism; what it did to the people's lives, their jobs, the state of ethnic disputes, their economy, etc. It also really dropped the reader into the daily lives of the people being interviewed which was vastly more interesting than I would have expected. However, I can't say the author executed this particularly well, because if you have no real sense of history about these countries already (as I didn't) then there's a lot that you are taking at face value. This was both good and not so good. I didn't have sufficient context that I could rely on when it came to certain countries state of affairs but I, nonetheless, enjoyed these bits I learned about Ukraine entering into the EU, Albania's many toadstool-like bunkers, and Estonia's citizens without citizenship and the great number of Estonian Russians. This honestly fanned a flame that I didn't know was burning in a corner of a my mind because I really would like to learn more about Eastern European history and how Capitalism in some of these countries was less welcomed (if at all) than others and their views on it. Absolutely fascinating.