Status
Available
Genres
Publication
New York : Vintage Books, 1993
Description
The Magic Lantern is one of those rare books that define a historic moment, written by a brilliant witness who was also a participant in epochal events. Whether covering Poland's first free parliamentary elections--in which Solidarity found itself in the position of trying to limit the scope of its victory--or sitting in at the meetings of an unlikely coalition of bohemian intellectuals and Catholic clerics orchestrating the liberation of Czechoslovakia, Garton Ash writes with enormous sympathy and power.
User reviews
LibraryThing member jonsweitzerlamme
If you want to understand what happened in 1989, you need to read this book. Ash was on the ground and knew all the key players on the anticommunist side. There's no attempt to draw any kind of big-picture conclusions; the story is detailed and full of illustrative anecdotes.
LibraryThing member mykl-s
When life in the Soviet Bloc was still mysterious, this book helped me understand better.