The Economist Book of the Week on 29th May 2010 was A Tale of Two Villages by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi. "A dramatic, thought-provoking and sometimes savagely funny account of one of the toughest problems in Europe: the ingrained poverty of the Romanian countryside."

CEU Press launched Masterpieces of History - The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe, 1989, the sixth book in the Cold War Reader Series, on May 31 at the Open Society Archives. The volume, based on the ground-breaking research and documentation of the National Security Archive in Washington DC, contains crucial historical documents and is absolutely indispensable for understanding the end of the Cold War.

Prague Tales leads top ten of CEU Press sales after 2000. 2. Memoir of Hungary, 3. The 1956 Hungarian Revolution, 4. A Cardboard Castle, 5. Jewish Budapest, 6. A Biographical Dictionary, 7. Stalin – an Unknown Portrait , 8. Uprising in East Germany, 9. A Life under Russian Serfdom, 10. Russian Foreign Policy in Transition




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For the Good of Humanity
Ludwik Rajchman, Medical Statesman

Marta A. Balinska, Columbia University's Paris Program

"It is a rediscovery of a utopian who believed in the efficiency of international institutions, in the troubled era of fierce nationalism."
- Le Monde

In this biography of Ludwik Rajchman, Marta A. Balinska paints a portrait of a true hero of our times. He was born in Poland in 1881 and was an exponent of humanitarian intervention and defender of colonized people, as adept in secret diplomacy as in organizing vast anti-epidemic campaigns. He inspired the creation of WHO and the foundation of UNICEF, of which he became the first chairman. Progressive but opposed to all dogmas, he was forced by McCarthyism to flee the U.S. and soon became an object of suspicion in the Soviet bloc, finding himself estranged from his beloved Poland.

As the story of this remarkable life unfolds, the reader is given a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the major events that shaped the twentieth century. Using family archives and documentary sources from a dozen countries, the author brilliantly reconstructs the career of a man who was not only the first médecin sans frontiere but also an intellectual with an exceptional sense of the universal.

1998
310 pages
ISBN 978-963-9116-17-7 cloth $44.95 / €33.95 / £30.00

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