The Coasts Of Bohemia - A Czech History

Bohemia has coasts, according to Shakespeare, which is awkward because geography has always rather disagreed. Derek Sayer takes that splendid mistake and turns it into a doorway.

The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History is not a dry march through kings, borders, treaties, and dates, though there are plenty of those lurking about. It is a cultural history of the Czech lands told through memory, identity, art, nationalism, politics, empire, and the strange business of inventing a country while living inside other people’s empires.

This is history with mirrors in it. Prague, Bohemia, Moravia, Habsburg rule, Czech revival, modernity, nationalism, communism, and the uneasy aftermath all appear not simply as events, but as stories people told about themselves. Sayer is interested in how nations are imagined, staged, painted, sung, argued into being, and then treated as if they had been obvious all along.

There is a lovely irony in the whole enterprise. A landlocked country with imaginary coasts becomes the perfect subject for a book about historical imagination. Borders move, languages compete, monuments acquire meanings, and culture does the heavy lifting while politics pretends it was in charge.

This as new copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books, is ideal for readers of Czech history, Central European history, cultural history, and anyone who enjoys books where the title is already arguing with the map. A serious, elegant, slightly mischievous work on the invention of identity and the stubborn unreliability of nations.

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