Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

National Book Award Finalist TIME Magazine's #1 Nonfiction Book of 2012 A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2012 Best Nonfiction of 2012: The Wall Street Journal, The Plain Dealer In the much-anticipated follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag,  acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history  of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and  transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its  sway. Iron Curtain describes how, spurred by Stalin and his  secret police, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and  what daily life was like once they were complete. Drawing on newly  opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts  translated for the first time, Applebaum portrays in chilling detail the  dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of  life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they  had accumulated. As a result the Soviet Bloc became a lost civilization,  one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics  Applebaum captures in these electrifying pages.