About the Author

William M. Brinton was the founder of Mercury House, Inc. in San Francisco. An attorney with a background in international law and litigation, he was the author of The Alaska Deception and A Role for the Small Press: Publishing in a Global Village. Alan Rinzler has been an editor at Simon and Schuster, MacMillan, Holt, Bantam, and Grove Press, and was one of the founding members of Rolling Stone magazine. He lives in Berkeley, where he is both a psychotherapist and freelance editor.

Reviews

Eleven of these essays were written especially for this volume, mostly by people of Central European descent living in the West. The remainder are reprinted works by such prominent persons as Vaclav Havel (the only contributor with more than one essay), Adam Michnik, and Josef Skvorecky. Andrei Sakharov's 1968 essay ``Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom'' appears to be included primarily because of the late author's stature as an activist. Germany and Poland receive more extensive coverage than do Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, the Baltic republics, and the Soviet Union, but any library with an interest in this part of the world will want this.--Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York