Joe Biden in Warsaw February 2023 - Podcast on the book 'A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland' (London 2008) - George Miller of 'Podularity' in discussion with the author Michael Moran


The Royal Castle in Warsaw offered a spectacular backdrop to President Joe Biden and the Polish President Andrzej Duda who addressed thousands of Poles in the castle gardens on the Vistula River
(Associated Press)

U.S. President Joe Biden stands onstage with children waving flags after he delivered remarks ahead of the one year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, outside the Royal Castle, in Warsaw, Poland, February 21, 2023

(Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters)

This remarkable visit was of great symbolic significance to me as I have watched this valiant nation once again implement their immortal Polish battle cry though the ages 'For your freedom and ours!'

The distinguished publisher Granta released my literary travel book on Poland in 2008. It covered my period working and my cultural explorations in Warsaw and further afield during the period of transition from the Soviet hegemony to the so-called market economy in the early 1990s, following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1986. So few books were written describing that seismic change. Hopefully without appearing conceited, mine is a rare book in any language that chronicles that absolutely surreal experience of dynamic transformation. Ah yes, the Poles know the Russians all too well....

The present visit of the United States President Joe Biden to Warsaw and Kyiv in the contemporary circumstances of war, threw me  forcibly back emotionally some 15 years to listen to a podcast I made in London at that time with my intellectually brilliant editor at Granta, George Miller. He runs a remarkable podcast organization of which I was an early candidate.

I thought you may like to share this intense experience of nostalgia with me, as not a great deal has changed fundamentally in terms of  my passion for the music of Fryderyk Chopin, Polish national characteristics of generosity and the landscape.

It is all I can do, powerless as I find myself, deeply immersed in this appalling situation that has exploded once again in  the heart of Europe...

https://podularity.com/2010/01/10/poland-a-country-in-the-moon/


Kazimierz Dolny is a small historic town in eastern Poland, on the right bank of the Vistula river in Puławy County

A Country in the Moon:Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland (London 2008)

http://www.michael-moran.net/poland.htm     (English edition)

http://www.michael-moran.net/pages/polish_editions/Kraj_z_Ksiezyca/index.htm

(Polish edition)

In April 2017  the author was presented with the Distinguished Achievement Award in Travel Literature by the University of Florida and the Eric and Edith
 Friedheim Foundation for this work

Bernado Bellotto, called Canaletto - View of Warsaw from the Praga district, 1770

Biden departs Warsaw

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