THE HOLE IN THE FLAG by...

THE HOLE IN THE FLAG by Andrei Codrescu (Avon: $11). In December of 1989, expatriate poet Andrei Codrescu returned to his native Romania to report on the overthrow of the brutal regime of Nicolae Ceaucescu. In this often moving account of his journey, he recalls his childhood in Sibiu, Transylvania, before Ceaucescu’s megalomania reached its later epic proportions, but when his family and his neighbors still had to hide the fact that they listened to Radio Free Europe at night. “If I had walked down any darkened street in my hometown at that hour, I would have seen the lowered shades and the furtive dark in which glowed the soft dial of the radio. . . . Thus, daylight was the time of the lie, while night held the truth.” But when he continued to research the political developments in Romania, he discovered that events were not what they had seemed. The news footage of brutalities had been faked, the reports of massacres falsified and the entire “spontaneous” uprising had actually been planned almost a decade earlier. Codrescu concludes that the coup was actually organized by the KGB to keep Romania in the Russian sphere of influence, a belief a second visit to Bucharest seemed to confirm: He discovered that many former officials, including members of Ceaucescu’s vicious secret police, Securitate, remained in power. Codrescu describes both his elation and his subsequent disillusionment with the vivid turns of phrase that have made him a popular commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”