Into the Sunlight: Life After the Iron Curtain - Softcover

Rapoport, Roger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0930588495 ISBN 13: 9780930588496

Publisher: Heyday Books, 1991

Synopsis

Text and photographs examine the new life of formerly Communist Eastern Europe

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Rapoport takes a refreshingly humanistic look at the changes inEastern Europe and the Soviet Union since the fall of the IronCurtain, concentratingpk on the ways in which citizens are coping withstruggling economic and political systems. Before arriving in theU.S.S.R. in early 1990, the author visits Poland; at Cracow's carflea-market, hopeful consumers who formerly had to wait five years toown an automobile now can pick from a wide variety of "lemons" and"drive their choice home on the spot." Rapoport tours the State JewishMuseum in Prague, an institution originally planned by Hitler as a"showcase of an 'extinct culture,' " and learns about the newreligious freedom in Czechoslovakia. Much of the book is a chronicleof the life-saving surgery performed at the Leningrad Children'sHospital #1 by doctors from Oakland, Calif., using techniques unknownto Soviet medicine. Rapoport speaks to Soviet doctors and parentsabout the appalling state of health care. Writing in a simple andstraightforward voice, Rapoport ( The Great American Bomb Machine )draws an alluring portrait of peoples and countries in flux. Anafterword features an interview with Russian historian Martin Malia,whose predictive analysis of the fall of communism was published inthe New York Times under the pseudonym "Z." Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Early in 1990, Rapoport, a travel feature writer for the Oakland Tribune , accompanied a team of pediatric cardiologists to Moscow, where they demonstrated and taught surgical techniques to Soviet surgeons. En route he stopped in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. In a style more appropriate for the Sunday travel supplement, he offers pithy human interest features that mirror recent events in the region. In Cracow, he visits a used car lot, a bastion of Polish capitalism, and interviews the editor of a samizdat journal in Prague. Rapoport's most sustained images deal with medical services in the Soviet Union: scalpels are too dull to cut, and linen fibers are used as sutures if nylon ones are unavailable. He describes desperate Soviet families trying to get care for their frail children. For its light and easy style, this collection of essays belongs in travel collections.
- Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Heyday Books
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0930588495
• ISBN 13: 9780930588496
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104