![]() ![]() “The faces in the audience looked terrified throughout. Worse yet was the sight of massed thousands marching in a parade for their dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, or listening to him speak for three hours. ![]() “The city had been reduced to a vast echo.” People stood in glum queues for not much heat was scarce and fuel so precious that buses would soon run with methane tanks on top. “The silence of the streets was devastating,” he recalls in the opening pages of this haunting yet ultimately optimistic examination of the human condition as found in Romania. He felt as if he had abandoned the sun and vibrant colours, and entered “a black-and-white engraving in the shivery, November-hued Balkans”. ![]() When Kaplan arrived in Bucharest in the Cold War days of 1981, it was hardly an instant romance. It is an obsession that has led him to plunge into the surrounding Balkans, and farther afield to contemplate Europe in all its historic complexity. ![]() The object of his affection and fascination is not a person, but a country: Romania. Kaplan embarked on what this book portrays as an enduring love affair. In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyondīy Robert D. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |