SOURCE: "Poland Has 50 Good Years Coming," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 15, 1987, pp. 2, 11.

In the following review, Urbanska comments on the thematic diversity and frank tone of Moon rise, Moonset.

At first glance, it might seem that Tadeusz Konwicki had an ax to grind with his Poland. In Moonrise, Moonset, Konwicki's irreverent memoir of the fateful year 1981, the author spars with such sacred cows as Radio Free Europe, Solidarity followers and Czeslaw Milosz, the 1980 Nobel Prize laureate for literature. "I had an itch to give certain people a real thrashing," he writes, "but I lost the urge."

Don't believe him. In this alternately somber and zany ride through modern Polish history—with forays into the West, the East and the past—what the author states definitively one minute he contradicts the next. Just when you think you have a bead on the man, he'll zap you with...