Format: Paperback, 280 pp
Publisher: Narcissus Publications in association with
Central Europe Review/CEENMI
ISBN: 802385173X
Price: GBP 17.50 plus GBP 3.50 shipping and handling (about USD 30 total)

Available for purchase here from 1 March 2000, this new book by Sam Vaknin is a series of articles written and published in Macedonia, Russia, Egypt and the Czech Republic between 1996 and 2000.

The book contains articles and essays of differing nature but can be roughly divided into three broad subject areas. The first part offers social critique; the author's main thesis is that the West missed a unique historical opportunity to unite Europe and that the peoples of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe are beyond salvation, deformed and pathologized by Communism irreconstructibly.

The second part comprises articles about the economies of the region, and the third part deals with the history of the region with emphasis on Yugoslavia, Albania and Kosovo.

From the author:

How the West lost the East. The economics, the politics, the geopolitics, the history, the conspiracies, the corruption, the old and the new, the plough and the Internet — it is all here, in prose, as provocative and vitriolic and loving and longing as I could make it.

Reading this book, I wish upon the reader the joy and the revulsion, the dark fascination of this region and its surrealist dreams and nightmares. This is what I experience daily here, and it is my hope that I succeeded to convey the siren's song, the honeyed trap, the lure and the allure of this tortured corner of the earth.

After the Rain was recently reviewed in Blue Ear.

Download sample chapters of After the Rain HERE and HERE.

This work is also available as an electronic book in the CER eBookstore.

Ordering information:

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This work is also available as an electronic book in the CER eBookstore.