Exit into History: Journey Through the New Eastern Europe

Shortly after the dramatic events of 1989, Eva Hoffman, a Polish-born American, spent several months travelling through Poland and four other Eastern European countries which had just undergone an historic transformation. This is her narrative of those travels, and a portrait of a social landscape in the midst of change.;While making her way from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Hoffman passed through capital cities, wayside villages and sleepy provincial towns; she visited shipyards, museums, homes, and coffee-houses of the intelligentsia; and she talked with a great variety of people, many of them struggling with the transition from an unwanted past to an uncertain future.;Most of all, she uses her bicultural perspective to enter into Eastern European minds and sensibilities and convey what the larger social shifts mean to particular people: to former dissidents wielding political power, deposed apparatchiks turned successful entrepreneurs, artists and technocrats, literate ex-censors, Polish aristocrats, Hungarian gypsies and Bulgarian Turks.;Hoffman is the author of "Lost in Translation", an autobiography.