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Look! A Book!

Live Not By Lies arrives at its author's doorstep
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Boy, there’s nothing like holding your own book in your hand for the first time to make it real. UPS just brought me my author’s copies of Live Not By Lies, which will be published on September 29. I really love the cover design. Cassandra Garruzzo is the artist to credit — she did a magnificent job. The idea here is to use Soviet constructivist design to sell an anti-totalitarian message.

In his complimentary review this week, John Ehrett wrote:

I’m sure this is the first and last time that some of Dreher’s subjects’ stories will ever be told in the West.

He’s probably right, but I hope he’s wrong. One of the greatest blessings of my life has been the men and women I met in the former Soviet bloc — people of great faith and courage, whose stories are unknown in the West. One hope I have for this book is that it will both serve as a gateway to reading Solzhenitsyn, Havel, and the literature of Soviet-era dissent, and that it will spark widespread interest in telling the stories of the survivors of that era, while they are still alive. These men and women will not be with us much longer, and they are living treasures. Cherish them! I could only share a fraction of what I learned in their company. There is so, so much more. In a just world, there would be a library of books coming forth about them and the struggle of their peoples and nations. There would be nonstop dramas and documentaries. The fact that there hasn’t been is evidence of a ghastly erasure of cultural memory. Live Not By Lies is my very modest effort to right that historical wrong.

Here is the dedication page:

I did not know who this man was until I went to Bratislava last year, and was told about him. I’ve mentioned him many times in this space. He was a Croatian Catholic priest who escaped the Gestapo in Zagreb and hid out in Slovakia. He foresaw both the German defeat and the advent of Soviet totalitarianism for the nations of Central Europe. Despite the fact that some Catholic bishops called him an alarmist, Father Kolakovic urgently prepared young Catholic student groups for the resistance. And sure enough, when the Iron Curtain fell, the network of faithful students prepared by Father Kolakovic formed the backbone of the underground church.

Father Kolakovic’s life story is astonishing. He was God’s spy. He trained in the Russicum, the Vatican’s Russian college, for missionary work in the Soviet Union. In fact, it was his intense study of the Soviet system that allowed him to recognize what so many others would not or could not: that the Red Army was not going to allow the countries it liberated from the Nazis to be free. Father Kolakovic lived undercover in Russia, China, Vietnam, and elsewhere, but mostly his life is mysterious. It is said that nobody knows for sure where he is buried. If I had the facility in languages, and was trained to do the kind of research such a project would require, I would dedicate myself to finding out everything I could about this mysterious man, and write his biography.

If Live Not By Lies sells well, maybe someone more gifted than I will do just that. And maybe some other writers will find their way to what we called “Eastern Europe” in the Cold War, and get to know these men and women. Very few people in the United States know about Slovakia, but I found myself flat on my face praying at the tomb of Cardinal Jan Chryzostom Korec, an underground bishop in the communist period, whose acts of iron-willed faith and resistance beggar belief. I was taken to what had been his apartment, by Frantisek Miklosko, an older man who had been the late cardinal’s assistant. The stories he told about things the secret bishop did, including the time he fought off secret police who tried to seize him on the street! Eight years in a communist prison he served for his faith. Read more about him here.

It has been an extraordinary privilege to tell stories like this on this online diary, and in the pages of Live Not By Lies, and to introduce American readers to the people who saw much, and suffered much, and who have things to tell us that we need to hear.

UPDATE: If you would like to pre-order a signed copy, you can do so exclusively through Eighth Day Books in Wichita. There are a limited number available.

UPDATE.2: Warren at Eighth Day Books has asked me to stress that the store will ship them out on September 29. You’ll get them a few days later than you would if you pre-ordered from Amazon, I think, but they’ll be signed by the author, via a bookplate.

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