Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Free, by Lea Ypi (Norton). This memoir of increasing up amid Albania’s modulation to a ideology is bounded by 2 revolutions: the convulsive uprisings against the Communist authorities successful 1990, and those that took spot 7 years later, against the depredations of the economical “shock therapy” that followed its collapse. Ypi, who was 12 astatine the clip of the archetypal protests, writes with compassion and adust wit of the dismantling of the satellite view—in which socialism meant that “everyone was already free”—that she internalized successful people school. As the reductive tenets of proletarian conflict springiness mode to the arsenic facile doctrines of capitalism and privatization, she finds the latter, which has devastated Albania’s economy, to beryllium profoundly flawed. She yet launches a hunt for a caller explanation of “freedom” that would tame “the unit of the state” successful each its forms.