This account of communism seeks to capture the sights and sounds, politics and personalities, opportunities and great risks of those tumultuous years. The first part of the book reproduces Garton Ash's "The Uses of Adversity". The second part reproduces "We the People".

This account of communism seeks to capture the sights and sounds, politics and personalities, opportunities and great risks of those tumultuous years. The first part of the book, which reproduces, in edited form, Garton Ash's award-winning book, "The Uses of Adversity", covers the period 1979-88, and describes life in Erich Honecker's ruthlessly authoritarian East Germany. The second part reproduces "We the People", his eye-witness account of the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe. It begins with Garton Ash inside the Gdansk shipyard with Lech Walesa and the other striking Solidarity workers. From there he travels to Berlin where he witnesses first-hand the fall of the Berlin Wall and then Romania, were he joins the crowds intent on the overthrow of Ceausescu's bankrupt regime.