This is another book I read years ago, and now cannot recall what it was like. ( )

It's whatever.

As far as essays go, these essays are very repetitive. The same themes are reiterated and explained many times, to the point of bordem. Many of these themes and motifs are simple and don't require that much to explain, like that Eastern Europeans and Western Europeans are divided, that Europe is just a continent that can't do anything, that history should not be erased, individualism is an ideal, and similar themes. Sometimes her themes get spicy, as she critiques elements of capitalism, nationalism, and the idea of a nation-state. They are not developed much, however.

The book is well written and certainly can be a page-turner at times. Other times, however, I wish I could finish a chapter and get on with my day. The translation used lots of hyphens, colons, semicolons, and British commas, which can spice up sentences. Sometimes, however, the translator treated H as a vowel and used phrases like "an history" which certainly broke my concentration. For Americans like me, Drakulic explains the context of what happened/is happening in Eastern Europe. Towards the end of the book, however, she drops the ball, and if you are an American like me, will probably have no idea about the conflicts between Muslims in Bosnia and Serbians in the Balkans (?). At least for me, I missed out on some of the themes she was trying to develop.

My main problem with this book is that it is most certainly a biased propaganda piece. Don't get me wrong, I very much dislike the USSR, the satellite states it created, the lack of democracy, its materially deficient life, and the mass murders, but the author straight-up lies to the audience at times. As a biased Marxist myself, my eyes were certainly rolling at phrases like "communist country" or how Drakulic contrasted communism and democracy, or how Drakulic equated communism to fascism.

I remarked in my notes that Drakulic lied to her audience for several reasons:
1. she simply forgot her state education (if they actually taught her anything Marxist related)
2. she remembers her state education but doesn't care and lies anyway
Either way, I find it disgusting that Drakulic would lie to her audience about what the USSR actually was, or what Yugoslavia actually was. At one point in her book, Drakulic writes, "But according to the egalitarian principles of any communist society, those ‘haves’ should share with the ‘have nots’. And because there is not much to share anyway, in the end, that egalitarianism boils down to the equal distribution of poverty. At least it would in theory - in practice it did not quite work." Anybody who knows a bit about Marxism will know that Drakulic is lying about Marxist principles. Marx very clearly disliked the idea of equality or egalitarianism for its own sake as a political goal in Critique of the Gotha Progamme; Marx instead advocated for the abolition of classes instead of mindless equality or egalitarianism.

Overall, this book is great as a condemnation of authoritarian state capitalism and showing the development of new ideas in Eastern Europe. This book would be rated higher if the author wasn't lying boldy to their audience, and if the book was cut down a bit. I would like this book a lot more if the author replaced the words "communism" with "state capitalism." ( )

A collection of interesting pieces written after the fall of Communism in the Balkans and the partition of Yugoslavia into its various ethnic, historical divisions. Lots of interesting musings on life during and after that time, reflections on the idea of "Europe" and how that manifests itself in the Balkans. ( )

I really like this book the author manage to move us to the live in the ex comunist countries of Europe, and even that she was making emphasis in Bosnia, the true is that several of her examples could be apply to the rest of this countries. I also love the fact that the author show us a part of the history that normally we do not see in books but is the real impact of this politics that normally we look as "too high" to really affect our lives. ( )

This is a collection of political reportage written in the years immediately following the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. According to the inside cover of the book, Drakulic “contributes regularly” The Nation and the New Republic, which would fit with the quasi-journalistic, descriptive approach that she takes in these pieces. I use with the word “journalistic” as a slight pejorative here, as a way of denoting a style that is more inclined to be demonstrative and flat, as opposed to couching her opinions in a critical framework that would offer the reader insightful explanations. Most of her conclusions are fairly banal, though some of her observations are not devoid of interest.

For a book of barely two hundred pages, there are twenty-five essays, so they are short and accessible, almost made for picking up and putting down at leisure. In fact, the one major criticisms I have of the book is that the essays are a little too short, so much that it sometimes inhibits Drakulic’s ability to fully flesh out the ideas at hand. The essay topics are varied, but tend to revolve around a constellation of relatively abiding concerns: two of these are the consumerism of post-liberalized, post-communist Eastern Europe and its growing homogeneity, and shifting political attitudes.

Drakulic is deeply ambivalent about Europe being taken over by the cultural accoutrements – really only simulacra – of Western Europe, symbolized by the ubiquitous “Café Europa,” the iconic Viennese coffee shop, which has apparently cropped up all over the place. Even the name “Europe” has come to signify a kind of sybaritic luxury. A cinema in Drakulic’s home city of Zagreb changed its name from “The Balkan” to “Cinema Europa,” indicative of a willed escape from primitivism, war, and everything non-European. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is how Drakulic looks at Europe as a name “loaded with the complexity of positive values” (p. 11). Which begs the question: is Europe one thing any longer, or merely what we make of it for ourselves?

The highlights of the collection, not surprisingly, are the pieces in which Drakulic gives herself the appropriate space to think through an issue. Here are a few of my favorites, including a short description of each. “The Trouble with Sales” explores some patterns – ones that Drakulic herself admits are paradoxes – about shopping and consumerism in an age of the new economic logic of capitalism, especially her old habit of seeking out sales – a habit which she can’t seem to finally kick. “Invisible Walls Between Us” looks at the bizarre and discriminatory travel strictures imposed on Easterners, who are often looked down upon as suspicious foreigners while traveling in Western Europe. “A King for the Balkans” is an insightful look at the political psychology in Yugoslavia as Prince Alexander Karadjordjevic makes his first post-exilic visit to an unusually warm reception given the country’s history under previous monarchy. ( )