[A]ssiduously researched, compulsively readable ... Abrahams speaks the language, has read the documents, witnessed many of the key episodes for himself, and interviewed almost every player of significance. Albania is a country filled with wily, resourceful, worldly, funny, and fatalistic people, and with their many contributions Abrahams's narrative is as darkly farcical as it is tragic. -Andrew Gumbel,Los Angeles Review ... Read moreof Books The canon on modern Albanian political history in English is small but Fred Abraham's book is now a large contribution to it. Excellent and above all readable; anyone interested in contemporary Albanian and Balkan history should be grateful that he has committed his deep knowledge about the country, and above all its travails in the 1990s, to paper. -Tim Judah,author of Kosovo: War and Revenge In this intimate portrait of the country, he explains how the old regime
the last of the Eastern European communist regimes to fall
slowly crumbled and a democratic party, largely student-based, formed, faltered, and gave way to a transfigured communist party. -Robert Legvold,Foreign Affairs Abrahams has been afforded the opportunity to 'peer behind the curtain of a society that is for many outsiders opaque'. Yet it is his character portraits, which are reminiscent of both Ryszard Kapuscinski and John le Carre, which bring this richly woven work of narrative non-fiction to life. -Will Nicoll,The Spectator Show Less