Commies, crooks, gysies, spooks & poets

In this book, which won the Carl Sandburg Award for Non-fiction, novelist Jan Novak journeys from Chicago to his Czech homeland following the Velvet Revolution to pass on to his American-born children a sense of their ethnic heritage. "This raucous account of their year-long stay is the equivalent of a pub conversation with an affable stranger that becomes an all-night marathon of bear-fueled wisdom" (Washington Post).