Never have two such important world figures collaborated in a biography: Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), the original philosopher-president who founded Czechoslovakia in 1918, and Karel Capek (1890–1938), the leading Czech writer of the time. Capek interviewed Masaryk over a number of years and produced a single narrative that tells Masaryk's incredible story in a voice as ordinary yet magical as the best of Capek's fictional characters. The result is a biographical work like no other, in form or in content. (view table of contents)

This parable of censorship and the modern state centers on Hanta, a trash collector whose habit of salvaging and reading discarded books has brought him both the richness of the classics and the ridicule of his boss