Ripped Apart Book Review by Marjorie Acker

Ripped Apart Book Review by Marjorie Acker

It is not a widely discussed – or understood – occurrence, but it can be simply stated: slightly more than 100 years ago, Hungary as it once was – a kingdom – was brutally dismembered as a result of, some say, ill-advised decisions made at peace talks at the Trianon palace outside of Versailles in 1920. Two-thirds of Hungary’s land was cut away, and more than 3.3 million of its ethnic Hungarian citizens found themselves members of another nation.
Ripped APART

Ripped APART

This work is based on a rather hectic yet humdrum story of a small group of friends living in Toronto, all middle class and each in his or her own way caught up in increasingly tragic middle age crisis, which forms the baseline for the book from beginning to end.

The Refugee

Zoltán Böszörményi begins THE REFUGEE with his harrowing escape from the threat of imprisonment in an Eastern European dictatorship but devotes the bulk of the book to his equally adventurous detention in a Western European refugee camp, taking the reader beyond the TV news images to give an inside look into the everyday life of a community of desperate people facing uncertain future.
Pining away

Pining away

This book combines fiction and reporting beyond the usual definition of literary nonfiction by applying modern literary conceits to bringing to light a social issue typical of Eastern Europe where the story was researched and written in Hungarian by Zoltán Böszörményi, working in Romania.