The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague

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.

Great book. To the author's insight one must add the fact that he witnessed the events firsthand and that he writes wonderfully. The result is a book that must be read, if possible followed by The File: a Personal History (I read them in the wrong order). Knowing the past helps you understand better the present, it is said. That's exactly how I feel, having just finished the book. The importance of people such as Václav Havel and even Václav Klaus, the current president of the Czech Republic, is make very clear. Especially in the case of Václav Klaus, one understands better his reluctance to sign the Lisbon Treaty or to go along the global warming scare. I bought this book in the shop of the The Lobkowicz Collections show more (http://www.lobkowicz-collections.org), which itself is a remarkable case of procedural justice that could only have happened in a country that suffered decades under a communist regime. Not having had that experience, the rest of Europe does not really understand the true, deep meaning of distributive (in)justice. show less

Definitely read this before, maybe a different edition? Was there a czech-only version? Anyway, it was nice to relive and as usual offered some perspective on our current situation.

When life in the Soviet Bloc was still mysterious, this book helped me understand better.