Dancing Bears

Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Held Captive to Old Ways of Life in Newly Free Societies by Witold Szabłowski
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There was along tradition among Eastern European Gypsies to earn money by showing a dancing bear. When Bulgaria joined EU they had to stop it. Bears are bought out from owners and transferred to a nature park. Bringing them to freedom is a long, difficult and painful process. Actually it is a failure. All freed bears have to be castrated as they are unable to teach their kids how to live in wilderness.
First part of the book tells stories of bear keepers and of Four Paws representative responsible for negotiations with bear owners.
Great story beautifully told.
The second part tries to find analogy between process of releasing bears to "freedom" and difficulties of people of countries which abolished Communism to adjust to free market economy and politics.
In my opinion author fails in this part of the book.
The idea was great. First part of the book is divided into chapters describing various stages of bears transfer: Love, Freedom, Negotiations, History, etc.
The second part is divided into chapter with same names, each chapter describing a case from a different country.
As I said, the idea was great, but I cannot find any relation between the chapter title and the story it contains.
Another point is, that cases described it the book do not prove authors thesis. In my opinion people interviewed by the author manage very well. They demonstrate unusual inventiveness, energy and initiative to earn money in the new system. They just grumble from time to time about some nonsense - e.g. a collective farm in Poland closed, people earn money performing in Hobbit's Village, many food products are imported from Germany.
The last chapter looks like a misunderstanding - crisis in Greece. It had nothing to do with Communism, Greeks lived in full freedom, they just wasted money with a silent approval of European banks.
For me, as a person who spent most of his life in Communist Poland, the book was just a return to memories from the better part of my life. Readers with no such background will not get even this satisfaction.

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