Recenze natvrdo a na vodě
A Hard-boiled, Watery Review

Summary/Abstract: The author takes issue with Martin Franc’s review, ‘Nedotažená syntéza: První vysokoškolská učebnice dějin Československa 1948–1989’ (Half-baked: The First University Textbook on the History of Communist Czechoslovakia) published in the previous issue of Soudobé dějiny, 19 (2011), 2, pp. 316–22, of Jan Rataj and Přemysl Houda’s Československo v proměnách komunistického režimu (Prague: Vysoká škola ekonomická and Nakladatelství Oeconomica, 2010). Franc’s review, according to the author, is the kind that seeks to belittle the work and ‘knock out’ its author(s). The author rejects the reviewer’s criticism of the allegedly unclear periodization and structural imbalance of the book, and he finds the reviewer’s criticism of his interpretations to be merely a collection of impressions, aversions, and new stereotypes. Together with his co-author, his aim was, he argues, to write a history and political-science textbook for university students, which would offer a broad background of the people and institutions of the time; it was not their purpose, he states, to make an encyclopaedic scholarly synthesis, a fact that the reviewer has failed to take into account.

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