RaveJacobin... brilliant and moving ... gorgeously written ... Ypi’s reflections on the stability and comfort of her youthful Marxist worldview speak to the experiences of hundreds of millions of individuals who had their entire lives overturned by the rapid succession of events that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 ... Ypi is not shy in criticizing the many faults of Albania’s previous regime, particularly as they relate to the persecution of her own family, who lived their entire lives haunted by having the wrong \'biographies.\' But she avoids the simplistic, knee-jerk anti-communism of so many other memoirs of the children and grandchildren of the expropriated bourgeoisie. Ypi balances her condemnations of authoritarian rule with an equally critical view of the social, political, and economic processes that typified the arrival of democracy in the 1990s ... lurking beneath the lighthearted prose of the memoir are serious interrogations of how a specific set of idealized notions about liberty proved disastrous to those whose lives were ruptured by the largely unexpected collapse of communism in Eastern Europe ... what makes Ypi’s book so important is its lack of didacticism and her ability to let the narrative flow without too many political asides ... Just maybe, Ypi’s poignant and timely book will inspire a much-needed East-West conversation about the most effective ways to resist the hegemony of liberal definitions of freedom and their complicity in upholding the savage rapacity of global capitalism today.
