cover image Ticket to Latvia: A Journey from Berlin to the Baltic

Ticket to Latvia: A Journey from Berlin to the Baltic

Marcus Tanner. Henry Holt & Company, $0 (197pp) ISBN 978-0-8050-1346-7

Although books about Eastern Europe tend these days to become outdated even as they are being written, the British author's journey, related with delightfully subtle wit, has period charm. A lone traveler making his way from the Federal Republic across the Berlin Wall to the DDR, on to Prague, Cracow, Riga, Vilnius and Leningrad, Tanner, a one-time Anglican seminarian and now a correspondent in Belgrade, seems not to have detected signs of the ferment about to erupt. He found the mainline DDR folk ``pronouncedly bourgeois''; that the Czechs ``neither learn nor forget anything''; that the Poles are enterprising at fleecing the Western tourist; that in Vilnius and Leningrad, even with Intourist to take over the burden of arranging his accommodations, his hotels proved to be ``dumps.'' The main interest in the book, however, is in the history Tanner relates, especially about unfamiliar Lithuania. (Sept.)