Books

Before settling in Poland and establishing both Kania Lodge in Kaszubia and Wine Express, the country’s first mail order wine company, John Borrell had been a war correspondent with Time magazine. In his last posting as Time’s bureau chief for Eastern Europe and the Balkans, he covered the collapse of communism and the beginning of the end of Soviet hegemony throughout the region.

He reflects on that time and a journalistic career that had earlier taken him to Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East in his critically acclaimed memoir, Flickers of Sunshine. That followed an earlier memoir, The White Lake, in which he recalls his good times and bad in building now iconic Kania Lodge on a lakeside in Kaszubia. In a review of this book for The Spectator in London, the award-winning author Anne Applebaum, called him the ‘Don Quixote of Kaszubia,’ and praised the active part he’d played in the transition to democracy and capitalism throughout Eastern Europe.

In the just-published final book of his memoir trilogy, Kania on a plate, Borrell writes of his and wife Ania’s adventures with food and wine at their lakeside hotel. He also writes presciently about the war in Ukraine. His reporting includes a lovely story on how a piano brought by his wife’s family from Galicia during the Soviet expulsion of Poles in 1944 and completely restored this year, was brought to life again at a recent concert at Kania Lodge. The pianist for the occasion was a very talented teenage Ukrainian chased out of Crimea in 2014 and bombed out of her home near Kiev earlier this year.

The trilogy is available in Polish and English and the books are 45 zl each or 90 zl for the complete set of three.