SOURCE: Applebaum, Anne. “A Gathering of Dissidents.” New Republic 211, no. 23 (5 December 1994): 46-9.

In the following review of Exit into History: A Journey through the New Eastern Europe, Applebaum contends that Hoffman's position as an American outsider in Eastern Europe makes it difficult for her to understand the subtleties of the region's political situations.

About halfway through her journey across the six nations of Central Europe chronicled in Exit into History, Eva Hoffman has an odd experience. She is in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, and she is sitting in a wine bar, drinking the potent white wine for which the Slovaks are justly famous. Jozef, her companion, is an intellectual, a man who translates books of philosophy into Slovak. He tells her that he doesn't mind that his own works, also composed in Slovak, are not read: “It doesn't matter whether the world pays attention,” he says. “Each...