This is a good example of travel literature at it's best. Lesley Chamberlain says that she set out to record her impressions of the eastern bloc. Because she is highly educated and intelligent, we are presented with a series of sensitive portraits of ways of life behind the Iron Curtain in the 80's, and an attempt to discern the effects of living under an overly repressive police states. But she also tracks the different "personalities" of each Communist state, bringing out the fact that each adapted itself in a slightly different way to the political system imposed upon them by Moscow. What emerges is an interesting portrait of, in her own words, "a way of life that has passed overnight into history."