Great book. To the author's insight one must add the fact that he witnessed the events firsthand and that he writes wonderfully. The result is a book that must be read, if possible followed by The File: a Personal History (I read them in the wrong order). Knowing the past helps you understand better the present, it is said. That's exactly how I feel, having just finished the book. The importance of people such as Václav Havel and even Václav Klaus, the current president of the Czech Republic, is make very clear. Especially in the case of Václav Klaus, one understands better his reluctance to sign the Lisbon Treaty or to go along the global warming scare. I bought this book in the shop of the The Lobkowicz Collections (http://www.lobkowicz-collections.org), which itself is a remarkable case of procedural justice that could only have happened in a country that suffered decades under a communist regime. Not having had that experience, the rest of Europe does not really understand the true, deep meaning of distributive (in)justice.