Borders Up!:Eastern Europe Through the Bottom of a Glass

The miseries of life under Communism were such that most intelligent people took to drink--not just to the odd social glass, but to mad obsessive drinking of the sort that leads less to hangovers than to falling asleep on frozen streets. Exiled journalist Vitaliev, no stranger to the bottle himself, took on the task of finding whether alcoholic consumption had continued at Soviet levels in the newly capitalist former Soviet bloc. A purist in his pursuit of plainest of plain vodkas, he gallantly consumes Czech beer and Bulgarian wine and meditates extensively on the mentalities that go with different sorts of drinking--he is equally and entertainingly rude about lager louts and wine bores. The book is also a farewell to alcohol--Vitaliev, already suffering from a stomach ulcer, decided after all this that perhaps drinking was simply a bad idea. And, as he journeys around Central and Eastern Europe, people in bars tell him stories--it is perhaps above all in these casually told and not wholly relevant funny stories that he puts together most convincingly his picture of a world that has got out from under an oppressive system without really knowing what comes next. --Roz Kaveney