Vaclav Havel

[TheBrazilianFly]

I have heard many things about him and how he helped his country and stuff. I know that he is a writer and that he has written some good books. I would like to know if there's any fans of Havel here that could recommend me a few of his best books. Thanks.

 

[RockNRollDawgie]

Another thing in Havel's favor is that he's a huge Frank Zappa fan.

 

[TheBrazilianFly]

He is also a big Rolling Stones fan.

 

[U2Kitten]

I heard he was cool and into rock and roll!

 

[verte76]

I haven't read any of Havel's plays, but a long time ago, not long after he became President of Czechoslovakia (before the Czechs and the Slovaks separated) they showed some of his plays on TV. F. Murray Abraham played the lead roles. They were excellent. I think I might look on the Internet for his stuff. Type "Vaclav Havel" into Google. I think I'll try that.
And yes, he's a big rock 'n roll fan. I remember he wanted to bring rock bands to Prague and he got a fair number of them in there including R.E.M.

 

[verte76]

Ooh, yes, go to Google and type in "Vaclav Havel". I found this text of a speech he made in Philadelphia in 1994. It's a heavy-duty philosophical speech.

http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/havelspeech.html

I'm going to check out more of his stuff.

 

[TheBrazilianFly]

I had looked for him at google and I found some stuff about him but I wanted some more direct answers form people who had read his books. By the way thanks a lot for the link, I study the kind of things he is talking about on that speech and I did a paper work some time ago where I could have used that baby, maybe in the future.

 

[verte76]

I've never seen anything about his books being sold in the U.S. I think he wrote his plays in Czech and I'm not sure that any were ever translated aside from the scripts for the TV special I saw. But that Philadelphia speech is really excellent and so are some of his others.

 

[TheBrazilianFly]

I've never seen anything about his books being sold in the U.S. I think he wrote his plays in Czech and I'm not sure that any were ever translated aside from the scripts for the TV special I saw.

Well that sucks.

 

[verte76]

Well that sucks.

Yeah, it'd be nice to have translations of his plays. But his role as a playwright in Prague got totally overshadowed by his political significance. There's no doubt that not only did he play a key role in the liberation of his own country, but that of Central and Eastern Europe as a whole. But I don't want to turn this into a FYM-type thread so I won't.