SOURCE: Simmons, Cynthia. Review of Café Europa: Life after Communism, by Slavenka Drakulic. Slavic and East European Journal 42, no. 2 (summer 1998): 343-45.

In the following review, Simmons compares Drakulic's oeuvre to the works of Dubravka Ugresic and asserts that Café Europa is both informative and entertaining.

Café Europa is the Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulić's third book of essays on life in post-Communist (now ex-) Yugoslavia. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New York, 1992) brought the author to the attention of American readers. Lecturing on the first book in this “series,” she amused audiences by holding up a tampon as a symbol of why communism was destined to fail—its inability to provide citizens with the basic requisites of modern existence. She also lamented the intractability of communism in Eastern Europe, even after its formal demise, as a “state of mind.” Another book of short essays appeared the...