Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
PeterSugar
(ed)
A History of Hungary.
A useful and not too academic survey of Hungarian
history from pre-Conquest times to the close of the Kádár era, with a brief epilogue on the
transition to democracy.
Tony Thorne
Countess Dracula
. An intriguing biography of the sixteenth-century “Blood
Countess” Erzsébet Báthory, which argues that she was framed by her uncle to safeguard the
Báthory fortune.
BIOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL WRITING
MagdaDénes
Castles Burning: A Child's Life in War
. A moving biographical account of the
Budapest ghetto and postwar escape to France, Cuba and the United States, seen through the
eyes of a Jewish girl. The author died in 1966, shortly before the topic was published.
George Faludy
My Happy Days in Hell
(Penguin Modern Classics). A remarkable auto-
biographical account of Faludy's horrendous experience of both Nazi and Soviet repression,
including starvation and torture in a labour camp, told with ironic good cheer. His
Selected
Poems 1933-80
presents fiery, lyrical poetry with themes of political defiance and the nobil-
ity of the human spirit.
RayKeenoy
Eminent Hungarians.
Everything you always wanted to know about Hungary's
most renowned historical and contemporary figures - from Lajos Kossuth and Attila József,
to Harry Houdini and Ernő Rubik, creator of the Rubiks cube.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
A Time of Gifts; Between the Woods and the Water.
In 1934 the
young Leigh Fermor started walking from Holland to Turkey, reaching Hungary in the clos-
ing chapter of
A Time of Gifts.
In
Between the Woods and the Water
the inhabitants of the
Great Plain and Transylvania - both Gypsies and aristocrats - are wonderfully evoked. Lyric-
al and erudite. Artemis Cooper's biography,
Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure
, also sheds
interesting light on his account.
Edward Fox
The Hungarian Who Walked to Heaven.
A brief account of the life of Sándor
Kőrösi Csoma, the Hungarian who went in search of the roots of the ancient Hungarians and
got sidetracked into making the first Tibetan dictionary.
John Paget
Hungary and Transylvania
. Paget's massive book attempts to explain
nineteenth-century Hungary to the English middle class, and, within its aristocratic limita-
tions, succeeds. Occasionally found in secondhand bookshops.
Giorgio and Nicola Pressburger
Homage to the Eighth District.
Evocative short stories
about Jewish life in Budapest, before, during and after World War II, by twin brothers who
fled Hungary in 1956.
ErnőSzép
TheSmellofHumans.
Afirst-ratebutharrowingmemoiroftheHolocaustinHun-
gary.
