The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism

New York: Random House, 1995. First edition. Stated. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xxiv, 437, [2] pages. Glossary of Names. Selected Bibliography. Index. Name of previous owner present. Tina Rosenberg (born April 14, 1960 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American journalist and the author of three books. For one of them, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism (1995), she won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the National Book Award for Nonfiction. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Northwestern University. In 1987 she won a MacArthur Fellowship, which she used to move to South America. Her experiences there led to her first published book, Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America (1991). Rosenberg's work has appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. She is a fellow at the World Policy Institute and an editorial writer for The New York Times who frequently writes for The New York Times Magazine. In 2013, she founded the Solutions Journalism Network with David Bornstein and Courtney Martin. Rosenberg examines the complex aftermath of the breakup of Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989. She dissects the lives of the people from Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia as they struggle with the psychological crises that accompanied this immense change. Among those she describes are dissidents accused of collaborating with the secret police, people aware that their loved ones have informed on them, and East German border guards on trial for following orders to shoot defectors. Freelance journalist Rosenberg's frequent trips since 1991 to eastern Europe and the former Soviet empire led to this trenchant report on the moral, political, and legal dilemmas confronting Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia as they face their Communist pasts. She focuses on Czech dissident/human rights activist Rudolf Zukal, whose parliamentary career was shattered in 1989.