A review by ifer0105
Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny by Witold Szabłowski

2.0

The premise of the book was fascinating for me. I learned a lot, but it fell short for me in a lot of ways. It's a serious of interviews and rather than use them to explicitly tell a story, the reader is left to make a lot of conclusions on their own. I didn't feel like the story device comparing the dancing bears to post communism life were always very obvious. On the whole, I learned a lot of facts, both about dancing bears, and eastern European countries, but as a book and story telling device it fell flat for me.