An Un-American Childhood: A Young Woman's Secret Life Behind the Iron Curtain

by Ann Kimmage

Book Overview

An Un-American Childhood is the thoughtful memoir of Ann Kimmage's experiences as a child and young woman in communist Czechoslovakia and China. In 1950, while McCarthyism reigned in America,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0820317683
• ISBN13: 9780820317687
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

a most unusual and enlightening memoir

A fascinating and well-written story of a young child being taken by her communist parents out of the USA during the height of the anti-communist hysteria, living first furtively in Mexico, then Prague, Czechoslovakia under an assumed identity -- interspersed with some years in a China at the brink of the "cultural Revolution" -- and how the return of the family to America had to be orchestrated. It recounts how the intelligent idealistic parents - and then the author herself in her teen years - were deluded into believing communist states really promised a more just society, until disillusionment set in. I also found it very interesting that the author, immersed into a Czech society and schools, considered herself almost more Czech than American (while her parents hardly learned the Czech language). Her love of Prague is very poignant to me, since my family lived there when I was 5 to 12 in the 1930s, escaping the Nazis just before WW2 started.

Wonderful book about an interesting life

So I had Ann Kimmage at SUNY Plattsburgh for freshman comp. I read her book and I absolutly loved it. She tells her story in such a way that you feel like you are right along side of her. Livingi n Russia during the time she did was very dangerous. I loved the stories about her parents. They seemed like the coolest people out there. This book is great and it is true. Ann is a wonderful lady and a good teacher. No wonder why her book is awesome!