Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe

A "compulsively readable" account of the collapse of Europe's last Communist regime and the dramatic events that followed (Los Angeles Review of Books).

In the early 1990s, Albania, arguably Europe's most closed and repressive state, began a startling transition out of forty years of self-imposed Communist isolation. Albanians who were not allowed to practice religion, travel abroad, wear jeans, or read "decadent" Western literature began to devour the outside world. They opened cafés, co...