Word: adamec
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Adamec's father and teachers remember the 18-year-old as a bright, sensitive kid who quickly graduated from a fascination with ants and cacti to a sophisticated understanding of electronics. He repaired calculators, mobile phones and even assembled his own computer. "There were moments when he knew more than his teachers," says Pavel Bílek, director of a grade school Adamec attended in his hometown of Humpolec, about 100 km southeast of Prague. But Adamec was also taunted by his classmates, because his mother walked him to school until he was 13 and because of his weight...
...Mental instability obviously helps explain several of the immolations. But what about Adamec and Másl? Josef Broz, co-author of a 1999 political manifesto that called on mainstream political leaders to resign in favor of politicians untainted by the past, argues that the Feb. 28 election of Václav Klaus as President was "symbolically behind" Adamec's death. A former Finance Minister and two-time Prime Minister, Klaus was elected six days before Adamec died and many see his victory as a triumph of the robber-baron capitalism that so disgusted Adamec. Zdenka Kmuníckov...
...Zdenek Adamec stopped understanding his son, also named Zdenek, when the boy was seven. "He asked me how a nuclear reactor worked," says the father, a tombstone carver. "I had to buy a book so I could give him some answers." Eleven years later, the son was still groping for answers, this time to a much larger question: how to save a world that he felt was headed for the abyss. Last month, Adamec made up his mind. On March 6, he walked to Wenceslas Square in Prague, climbed the steps of the National Museum, doused himself with gasoline...
...surprise to those familiar with Czech history. In 1969, 28 Czech residents set fire to themselves in the 31?2 months after Palach's death, which brought some 200,000 people into Wenceslas Square to light candles and lay flowers. Thirty-four years later, relatively few came to mourn Adamec. But his death and the copycat immolations that followed have become a kind of Czech Rorschach test, as people seek and find explanations that may have more to do with themselves than with the suicides...
...Government. After only four days as Deputy Prime Minister, Marian Calfa won the top job last week when Ladislav Adamec quit. At week's end Calfa offered to form a Cabinet in which half the members would have no ties to the Communist Party...