"The story of psychologist Nicolae Mărgineanu's imprisonment and survival conveys in detail the impact of Communist rule in Romania"--

This study challenges the rose-tinted view of the interwar period in Romanian history, which is often judged against the darkness of almost five decades of Communist rule. Romania, like several of the states of Eastern Europe, emerged from the First World War as it had entered it, as a predominantly agricultural country, and one of its major problems was the condition of the peasantry. This volume’s focus is the drive to improve that condition, on the collapse of democracy, and the search by Romania’s leaders for strategies to secure the state, to assert the country’s independence, and to maintain its territorial integrity in the face of the threat to the European order posed by two totalitarian systems, represented by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By examining recent scholarship, this volume provides the most up-to-date account of Romania’s predicament in the interwar years. Romania, 1916–1941 is a useful resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in foreign policy, politics, society, internationalization and late development in interwar Central and Eastern Europe.

Communism has cast a long shadow over Romania. The passage of little over a quarter of a century since the overthrow in December 1989 of Romania’s last Communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, offers a symbolic standpoint from which to penetrate that shadow and to throw light upon the entire period of Communist rule in the country. An appropriate point of departure is the observation that Romania’s trajectory as a Communist state within the Soviet bloc was unlike that of any other. That trajectory has its origins in the social structures, attitudes and policies in the pre-Communist period. The course of that trajectory is the subject of this inquiry.

"Based on detailed notes taken during a doctor's incarceration in the concentration camps and ghettos of Romanian-ruled Transnistria during the Holocaust, this memoir tells a gripping story of calculated murder, resistance, and survival. In the aftermath of the Romanian Holocaust, Transnistria, a little-known region north of Odessa, between the Dniester and Bug rivers, came to be known as "the forgotten cemetery." Between 1941 and 1944, an estimated 300,000 Jews were killed or died there from starvation and disease. This memoir by Dr. Arthur Kessler, based on daily notes he kept as a physician during his two-year imprisonment in Transnistria's Vapniarka concentration camp and Olgopol ghetto, provides a unique perspective of a Jewish medical doctor who witnessed murderous death as well as brave acts of resistance and survival. Introduced and annotated by historian Leo Spitzer and translated from German by the late Margaret Robinson, Dr. Kessler's memoir provides an engrossing account of his infamous discovery that Vapniarka's Romanian authorities routinely, and it seems knowingly, fed camp inmates a daily soup containing toxic chickling peas (Lathyrus sativus) that induced paralysis, kidney failure, and oftentimes death. It reveals the daring by which he, together with fellow inmate medical associates, saved hundreds of lives by organizing a hunger strike that resulted in the camp's dissolution and the prisoners' relocation to ghettos throughout Transnistria. Kessler's narrative continues with an account of privileges attainable by deportees with useful skills and provides illuminating details about informal systems and practices that enabled many to survive and to provide care to fellow victims of genocidal persecution. The memoir is illustrated with moving drawings produced by prisoners in the Vapniarka concentration camp and presented to Dr. Kessler in recognition of his brave work of healing"--

Trumplandia: Stories from New America is a collection of essays written between May 2016 and October 2019 about the transformation of America, a united nation that has become more divided than ever. Some pundits predict that if things don’t change another civil war could occur. Have we reached a point of no return? Hopefully, America is mature enough to learn from its mistakes and avoid further scars along its evolving history. “Tiberiu Dianu is a specialist in law, politics and post-communist societies… His latest book, titled Trumplandia, is a welcome addition towards understanding current events, Washington’s international policy, and the present American society; a society polarized and divided as it has not been since the Civil War… Mr. Dianu makes in-depth assessments of important events in today’s America and achieves not only fine descriptions, but as an expert in the field proves to have a “gut feeling" for them. For example, the author understands, and at the same time feels, the meaning of rising patriotism and nationalism as a shield against a yet not fully understood impact of globalization.” - NICHOLAS DIMA, PhD, Adjunct Professor and Research Associate, Nelson Institute, James Madison University, Virginia.

Examines the ideology of sacrifice in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, analyzing a range of fictional and real-life figures who became part of a pantheon of heroes primarily because of their victimhood.

Deciphers typical social practices as a hidden language of communication in urban plebeian society

The first book devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, exploring mass killings, Jewish responses, collaboration, and memory in a region barely known in this context

Ukrainian dissident Myroslav Marynovych recounts his involvement in the Brezhnev-era human rights movement in the Soviet Union and his resulting years as a political prisoner in Siberia and in internal exile.

An examination of territorial changes between Czechoslovakia and Hungary and their effects on the local populations of the borderlands in the World War II era