"The Ghosts of Europe, is a fascinating commentary on the politics, history and culture of a part of Europe that for half of the last century lay mysteriously behind the Iron Curtain."

"Anticipating the 20th anniversary of the 1989 revolution, Anna Porter felt empowered to visit four of the liberated countries --Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and her native Hungary -- to see and hear for herself what had happened. It turned out to be both a hectic and sometimes painful learning experience, and The Ghosts of Europe will make any thoughtful reader a lot wiser in the world."

"An ambitious, disturbing, darkly fascinating amalgam of history and documentary about the peoples of Central Europe...Porter conceived of The Ghosts of Europe as more than a collection of interviews. She provides context by layering in the region’s blood-soaked history, documenting these former Habsburg lands as they shed their totalitarian skins."

"With each country she visits, Porter offers a succinct, highly readable, contemporary history, interspersed with interviews with influential national figures regarding past, present and future...The prime virtue of the book may be its ability to deal with moral conundrums without a display of moral indignation -- indeed, with the recognition that nearly everybody has a reason for doing what he or she has done."

“Intimate and insightful: an exile’s poignant return home, an accomplished journalist’s shrewd analysis.”

"One couldn’t ask for a more well-connected tour guide. Porter deftly lays out the tumultuous history of these countries, interweaving it with a series of recent personal conversations with such storied members of the resistance as Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik and their former Communist overlords and a range of politicians, businessmen, intellectuals and archivists...Highly readable and enormously informative, this is a book that will make your head spin."

"In Anna Porter, we are in the presence not only of a journalist on a personal odyssey back to her own origins in Communist Hungary, but of a gifted storyteller who shapes a historically consequential narrative."

"Anna Porter is the modern version of a Renaissance explorer. She views old lands with a fresh eye and sends back essential dispatches about new worlds. A must read."

"The Ghosts of Europe is essential reading for anyone who cares about Central Europe’s past and its impact on the present. This book is in Anna Porter’s bloodstream and she writes with passion and conviction...Every page brims with information and first-hand knowledge."

"The Ghosts of Europe, is a fascinating commentary on the politics, history and culture of a part of Europe that for half of the last century lay mysteriously behind the Iron Curtain...Porter is a superb companion on this fraught, fascinating and sometimes disturbing journey, and she writes with intelligence, [and] dispassion."

"The theme of retrospect and prospect runs through Anna Porter's intriguing and accessible narrative of contemporary central Europe. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Porter set out to explore the changing political and cultural landscapes at the heart of Europe's latest transformations, in Poland and Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia...The portrait she paints is important and true."

"The Ghosts of Europe...[knits] up the threads of the present with the turbulent past...creating a complex tapestry of light and shadow that provides no easy answers...Focusing on the past century, Porter covers a dense landscape of loss, grievance, revenge and barely submerged guilt that echoes to the present day, raising troubling moral questions."