How We Survived Communism And Even Laughed

For Western readers, the trials of shopping, cooking, dressing and cleaning house in the east European countries are scarcely news and are not always consistently riveting. Perhaps too much of this Yugoslav journalist's book is taken up with matters of soup, soap and stockings, but she has some interesting things to say about the irrelevance of issues like feminism and ecology to east European women, of the discrepancies between their ideas about the West and the reality they find there, of the lasting imprint on their mentality of communist ideology and the experience of deprivation. The tone throughout is interrogative and more than a little world-weary.