How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

New York Times Book Review

A thoughtful, beautifully written collection of essays...blending provocative analysis with the texture of everyday life.

Library Journal

Drakulic's fine collection of essays draws strength from her keen powers of observation and sensitivity to her readers' interests. Her achievement is to depict the starkly common identity of everyday life in socialist Eastern Europe before its unlamented loss becomes irretrievable. It is a world in which party authority can create the ``sudden invisibility'' for an offending journalist, where public buildings share a ``shabbiness and color of sepia,'' and one that makes the post office an impenetrable ``institution of power.'' The essays are also about people, about the obsessive `` communist eye '' (italics original) disturbed by the injustice of New York's homeless yet neurotically envious of those wearing fur coats at home. The tragic irony lies in the book's title. Hoarding material objects enabled people ``to survive communism,'' but hoarding wartime memories and the inability to ``let the dead be dead'' may destroy the author's native Yugoslavia. Recommended for all public and academic libraries.-- Zachary T. Irwin, Pennsylvania State Univ.-Erie