SOURCE: Jackson, Merilyn Oniszczuk. “Pictures in Dissolving Frames.” Belles Lettres 9, no. 3 (spring 1994): 59.

In the following review, Jackson argues that Hoffman's attempts to bring a journalistic perspective to her travels through Eastern Europe in Exit into History conflict with the rest of the work's “lyrical” and “personal” tone.

From her solitary travels during 1990-91 through five newly liberated Eastern European countries, Eva Hoffman compiled Exit into History: A Journey through the New Eastern Europe. In it she portrays the diverse people she encountered as they struggle to catch up to free world economies. Hoffman, a former New York Times editor, hopes that an accurate picture will emerge from her writing, “as from fragments of a mosaic.”

An immigrant to Canada, Hoffman chooses her native Poland as her starting point. She calls on Adam Michnik, Lech Walesa's old friend and advisor, a Solidarity legend, and editor-in-chief of Warsaw's leading daily...