Poland's recent history from Solidarity to martial law, from martial law to the end of communism and today's rough and tumble politics are all encompassed in this collection of stories by Janusz Anderman's relentlessly honest gaze and his stark 'tape recorder ear' - the raw prose he pioneered amid the mainly lyric poetry of the Polish dissidents. "The crowd [here] has similarities to characters in the puppet theatre…the Journalist, the Pro­vocateur, the Official, the Drunkard, the Patriot Pole, the Oppositionist Pole, the Idiot Pole. They declaim convulsively on some current issue and vanish again into the crowd….This vision is suffi­ciently grotesque to be apocalyptic." JERZY PILCH in The World of Janusz Anderman "These intensely private visions carry powerful resonance." NEW YORK TIMES "An intense, committed writer whose sheer talent jostles energetically against his muckraker's impulses; a blunt polemicist redeemed by his gifts for gallows humor and surrealist portraiture." PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER