Headed for the Blues: A Memoir with Ten Stories

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of education at the University of
Prince Edward Island and Honorary Chief of the Mi'kmaq of Prince Edward
Island.

Headed for the Blues describes the author’s maturation in postwar
Czechoslovakia, a milieu in which injustice, bribery, and corruption
thrived, sustained by an insidious secret police force. There are
flashes of bitterness ( “[T]he world will always have its secret
police”) and mordant wit (“[T]his world born of surrealist union of
cannibal and machine gun knows no mercy”), but Skvorecky is no whiner.
Beating the system can be fun, and this experienced raconteur pokes fun
with the best.

Twice in a generation, a model democracy was thrust under the jackboot
of totalitarian regimes; one way it survived is to be found in the pages
of this shrewd and very readable book.