Song for Bohemia

Prague in the 1990s, an extraordinary place and time. The Cold War had ended. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Soviet-bloc countries like Czechoslovakia had just liberated themselves. The atmosphere was intoxicating, the future unmapped. And Anne Marie Kenny was there-a singer-turned-entrepreneur. Her true-life story reads like fascinating fiction-enduring family tragedy, singing at 21 on the Champs Élysées, enjoying an artistic career in Paris and Nice, and performing in Prague at the invitation of Václav Havel before moving there to start a business.

Readers meet remarkable people along Kenny's path: her attorney father who drowned in a boating accident when she was two; her Czech-American mother left to raise five children alone; François Mitterrand's economist who engaged her mind and heart; Catholic cardinal who, under communism, heard confessions while window-washing; a secretary whose grandfather had been forced into slave labor at Jáchymov uranium mines; a photographer whose parents were married at Terezín concentration camp; and Kenny's beloved war-hero husband-to name a few.

In the decade following the Velvet Revolution, the author lived and worked alongside Czechs discovering their place in a new democratic society while coming to terms with their past under totalitarian rule-a past they rarely spoke about. Likewise, Kenny kept secret the inner turmoil beneath her outer success. In her raw telling, these vices often threatened to destroy her, until the hand of music, artistry, and love extended a reprieve. She and those around her moved forward with Havel's message as their driving force, building a civil society that is "humane, moral, intellectual, spiritual, and cultural."

A Song for Bohemia is a love song and a tribute to the spirit of the Czech people, a story of a personal and collective journey to freedom. With the voice of an impassioned artist, this memoir does not merely speak, it sings.