This book was recommended to me by a library patron who found the book very interesting and wanted to know how the book compared to my experiences growing up in Eastern Europe.
The premise of How we Survived Communism and Even Laughed is simply that, even though women also participated in all the revolutionary events of overthrowing the totalitarian regime in 1989, they were much less visible then men. The author traveled to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Eastern Germany in 1990 at the time the new democracies formed in Eastern Europe, with a mission to learn about the lives women lived in the last 45 years.
How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed is a well-researched book full of facts and trivia about the life of women behind the iron wall and is interestingly written. To answer our patron’s question, I believe that the facts are very accurate about the living conditions for women in the Eastern Europe during the 70s and 80s. As I was reading this book with a sense of nostalgia many long forgotten memories re-surfaced. It is written in a funny, entertaining style, rather than dry factual form, so it could be enjoyed by wide variety of audiences, particularly adults interested in learning about life in a different time and different places.