East European Diaries

Essays and Vignettes

Some twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this account of post-communist Eastern Europe offers perspective beyond a nostalgic glance back at a unique moment in time. Written by a former expat, the focus is not on young Americans living it up in Prague or Budapest, but rather on the author’s everyday interactions, work-related and personal, with Eastern Europeans who were living through profound political change. Although the book does not set out to offer a solitary theory or pat solution for recent events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, it lays out a framework for better understanding them.