Thomas Swick moved to Warsaw at the height of the Cold War.
He suffered bleak winters in gloomy concrete apartment blocks, and he experienced two very different worlds: the closed-door life of spirited friends huddled over tables at home, and the empty windswept boulevards of an Eastern European capital without street life.
He also lived through events that would be seen as pivotal moments in the twentieth century: John Paul II’s first Catholic mass in Warsaw, the rise of Solidarity, and the imposition of martial law.
Tom’s newest book is a memoir of his life behind the Iron Curtain but it is also a writer’s coming of age in the heyday of post-Watergate journalism, and a love story that crossed continents.
Thomas Swick is the author of Falling Into Place: A Story of Love, Poland, And The Making Of A Travel Writer, Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland and A Way to See the World. His essays and stories have appeared in The Best American Travel Writing anthologies, Los Angeles Review of Books, Smithsonian, and National Geographic Traveler, among other places.
You can read more about Tom on his website, and follow him on Instagram and Twitter.
We spoke about life behind the Iron Curtain, Polish films, and the ten sins of travel writing.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
We also mentioned:
The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
Foreign Faces by V.S. Pritchett
Polish Films: Krzysztof Zanussi (The Structure of Crystal); Andrzej Wajda (The Promised Land, Ashes and Diamonds); Krzysztof Kieślowski (Dekalog, Three Colours trilogy); Paweł Pawlikowski Ida, Cold War); Roman Polanski (Knife in the Water)
The Father of All Things by Tom Bissel
Crazy River by Richard Grant
O Canada by Jan Morris
The Long Field and Travels in an Old Tongue by Pamela Petrow
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
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