This is a powerful little book. Not merely is it the first serious effort to explore the netherworld that formerly centrally planned economies now inhabit, having undone the props of the old order without yet building "a market-driven, price-regulated, private-property system." It is also an unusually clear and imaginative exploration of the essence of the "administered-command economy," particularly as it operated in the Soviet Union, of the obstacles that confront its reform and of the path that may lead out of the impasse to a world where markets rule.