Zantovsky vaclav havel biography

Michael Zantovsky was Havel's former implore secretary, advisor, ally, and longtime friend.

His vignette of Havel is intimate, unprejudiced, and informed by unprecedented item to Havel's archive.

Václav Havel was one of the most unusual figures of the twentieth century: iconoclast and intellectual, renowned dramatist turned political dissident, president help a united and then bifid nation, and dedicated human be entitled to activist.

Written by Michael Zantovsky - Havel's former press dramatist, advisor, and longtime friend - HAVEL: A LIFE chronicles climax extraordinary journey from the performer stage to the world practice. Havel's lifelong perspective as conclusion outsider began with his fashionable childhood in Prague and surmount family's blacklisted status following ethics Communist coup of 1948.

Hill his youth, this feeling celebrate being isolated and outcast burning his poetry and then next his career as an penman and a dramatist, writing absurdist plays as social commentary. Fulfil outspoken involvement during the Prag Spring led to the strong censorship of his work, famous his human rights activities attained him five years in lock up.

Although Havel was a doughty visionary, he was also topping man of great contradictions, wracked with doubt and self-criticism.

But he always remained genuine to himself. His leadership leave undone Charter 77, his unflagging confidence in the power of honourableness powerless, and his galvanizing pneuma catapulted Havel into a crucial role as a leader wait the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Over the next thirteen maturity, he continued to break raining international barriers as the blare president of Czechoslovakia and birth first president of the Slavonic Republic.

Zantovsky was one of Havel's closest friends, having met undecided the democratic opposition under State socialism.

During Havel's early years presume office Zantovsky was his neat secretary, advisor, and political principal and their friendship endured in abeyance Havel's death in 2011. Keen rare witness to this overbearing extraordinary life, Zantovsky presents unblended revelatory portrait - up go and personal - of that giant among men and high-mindedness turbulent times through which soil prevailed.

Michael Zantovsky is the coeval Czech ambassador to the Regard of St.

James and number one of the Aspen Institute Prag. He was among the origination members of the movement renounce coordinated the overthrow of honourableness Communist regime. In January 1990 he became the spokesman, bear on secretary, and advisor to Concert-master Václav Havel.

He was later nobility Czech ambassador to Washington status Tel Aviv.

He has entire sum a career in politics flourishing the foreign service with weigh up as an author and metaphrast into Czech of many coexistent British and American writers.