Andrei Codrescu left his native country at age nineteen, settling in the United States where he has authored numerous books, essays and poems, has taught university writing courses, given popular lectures, and offered frequent commentaries broadcast on the National Public Radio's award-winning "All Things Considered" program. He made a return trip to Romania in December 1989 as a journalist, to report on the revolution for NPR and for ABC-television's NIGHTLINE program hosted by Ted Koppel. This book is his account of that return, to observe the society he knew as a youth as it confronted the first days of its profound transformation from a dictatorship to a democracy.