"The Garden and the Workshop is not only for lovers of Vienna and Budapest, it is for history buffs of all stripes. But it is likewise for anyone interested in seeing what Hanak implicitly shows time and time again, namely the many points that postmodernist fin-de-siecle relativism shares with our own fin-de-siecle (or should I say fin-de-millennium?) postmodernist variety of ... Read moresame."
Michael Henry Heim, Washington Post Book World "Hanak always writes well, is always absorbing, and is consistently receptive to the latest trends in historiography... [The volume particularly] succeeds in those studies that describe the variety of intellectual responses to the challenges of capitalist transformation in Budapest and Vienna
those two very different urban centers of the two halves of one country. Hanak's account of this will continue to fascinate as long as people read cultural history."
Gabor Gyani, The Budapest Review of Books "There is much of value in this book. The chapter on Hanak+s cultural hero, Endre Ady, is fine and written with a genuine passion. The piece on operetta is amusing, that on letters during the war informative... What is most intriguing about the book ... is the chapter ... on the question of social marginality and cultural creativity."
Steven Beller, Times Literary Supplement Show Less