Mud Sweeter than Honey: Voices of Communist Albania

This book is a bit hard to follow, which is disappointing as the story of Communist Albania is largely ignored in the United States. Margo Rejmer collects stories, lives, and other aspects of Albania under Communist rule and explores how people were largely shut off from the outside world. Many people were not allowed to leave the country, and people from the outside were generally not allowed in. Like other Communist countries, the leadership started to become more paranoid over time, until they believed they were the only Communist country and all the others had given in to the Capitalistic West and the evils that it entailed.

I was anticipating more of a collection of oral interviews and people telling their stories of living in a small European country that was highly internal and nothing allowed in from the outside. What I got instead is a series of short stories that are presented in no real order and move around in both time and place. It is hard to know if there is any rhyme or reason to why certain stories are in certain spots.