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Enemies Of The People: My Family's Journey To America (2009)

by Kati Marton(Favorite Author)

3.76 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1416586121 (ISBN13: 9781416586128)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Simon & Schuster

review 1: This the true story of the childhood of Kati Marton, a former NPR and ABC news correspondent. Kati was born in Budapest, the daughter of Hungarian foreign correspondents working for AP and UPI. Her parents favored the Western life and were friends of American diplomats. The Hungarians, assuming they were spies constantly watched the family as events were changing rapidly in Hungary during the Nazi and Communist periods. Her parents were imprisoned in the mid-50s before eventually being freed and later moving to the U.S. With access to Hungarian secret AVO files she unearths the background of her parents' imprisonment in the 1950s. A good picture of living under extreme pressure in a police state.
review 2: The first of the book--about 80 pages or so--was ... morevery difficult reading because there was no chronology, just background, impressions, and overview, without clear sequence or purpose...just a lot of info. It read like the rambling remembrances of an obviously adoring daughter, so it was extremely biased (someone said that children are never the best biographers of their parents). Plus, her writing was a bit verbose in places. However, the last half of the book was really worthwhile; this section covered specifically the Cold War era. Because I hadn't seen many personal stories from this era or about Hungary, the book was an important addition to my reading. Ironically, this woman's search for her family's past was aided and actually preserved by the very agency, the AVO, that shadowed her parents for years and years. This was a great look at living inside a Communist country during the Stalin years and shortly thereafter. less

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