This book deserves the wide audience it will undoubtedly find. Engagingly written, smart, and surprising, The Greengrocer and His TV will be directly useful to scholars and students of European cultural and intellectual history, media studies, and the Cold War. But thanks to its wit and insight, Paulina Bren's Greengrocer is one of those rare academic monographs that repays reading from cover to cover, making it a pleasure for readers beyond the university classroom.

Bren's analysis of normalization-era television serials as a lens through which to understand late Socialism helps her move quickly beyond the standard dualisms that have dominated scholarship on the Cold War for so long. Rather than heroic dissidents and repressive establishment, “living in truth” and coerced public silence, Bren tells a more complicated story in which writers, producers, and entertainers who protested 1968 sheepishly reentered the fold within a few years. Post-1968 purges isolated and defanged the regime's most persistent opponents; the rest became “cocreators and comanagers of normalization” (60).

This is a very visual book, from its emphasis on the televised nature of the Prague Spring to the witty series of photos in chapter 2 featuring pairs of suited leaders, television administrators, and entertainers officiously shaking hands. In later chapters, Bren uses photographs and vivid imagery to take the reader into normalization-era living rooms, where Czechoslovaks avidly watched Jaroslav Dietl's television serials. Thanks to Bren's eye for telling detail, we learn inter alia about the cobblestones placed outside the Aeroflot offices in March 1969, in hopes that angry citizens would throw them through the windows (they did, thereby “justifying” a government crackdown and heightened censorship [32]).

Dietl's serials reflected on the recent past and tried to reconcile Czechoslovaks to normalization's new circumstances. For example, the enormously popular Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman tried to rehabilitate the reputation of state security, using events taken from the archives of the Federal Ministry of the Interior (74). Bren's wonderful description of the episode “The Well,” depicting the events of 1968 through the microcosm of murderous chaos within a single rural family, underscores Dietl's skill in reframing the Prague Spring as a moment of temporary political hysteria, inflicted on the country by its intellectuals: a “bloody civil war” worsened by the regime's “inability to find a way back to the people in time” (80–81). Other serials treated the challenges of agricultural collectivism, housing problems, and health care; the goal was always to show the Party as concerned, attentive, and capable of solving social problems.

In some ways the heart of this book is the fourth chapter, which makes a subtle argument recasting the dissidents as the outsiders they certainly were, rather than the heroes they became after 1989. Bren notes that dissident writings refused to address two central questions: “Why should the dissidents be trusted as the nation's ethical guardians, and what, in the aftermath of 1968, was wrong with the regime-endorsed quiet life?” (111). The regime had brought its citizens consumer goods and a relatively high standard of living; it had offered federalization to the Slovaks. Meanwhile, the reform Communists (many of whom were Charter 77 signatories) had themselves been the ones to vote overwhelmingly in favor of Soviet troops remaining in Czechoslovakia (99); they had then abandoned politics for philosophy, or “antipolitics.” They also accused all those who lived relatively normal lives during late Socialism of collaboration, as in Havel's famous “Power of the Powerless”: “[A]lthough ordinary citizens might well be accused of not living in truth, these same citizens were not exactly convinced that truth was on the side of the dissidents either” (99). The last part of chapter 6, which details the dissident argument in the samizdat journal Obsah (Content) regarding Jaroslav Dietl after his death in 1985, arrives at a similar conclusion. The controversy, Bren argues, “demonstrated that the dissident world was as susceptible as the official sphere to shifting ethical categories” (157).

I found interesting Bren's decision to justify her reliance on popular culture, and particularly nontextual popular culture, as source material—for “historians to look in all the wrong places” (7). Her comment is lighthearted, but I found it surprising that the author of a study of this caliber felt the need to defend her material, especially given her deft use of relevant secondary literature and archival sources. Is Bren's defense of her methodology a comment on historians' presumed stodginess, insisting on the preeminence of their beloved archives? Did she need to apologize at all?