SOURCE: "Romania's Big Bamboozle," in The New York Times Book Review, June 30, 1991.

In the following review, Kozinski commends Codrescu's The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile's Story of Return and Revolution for its accurate description of Romania and its people during the 1989 revolt.

Like the panorama of life in post-revolutionary Romania, which the poet and essayist Andrei Codrescu describes with both awe and revulsion, The Hole in the Flag is a work of great complexity and subtlety. For everyone who watched as the Romanian revolution unfolded, Mr. Codrescu provides a gripping political detective story.

Mr. Codrescu, a regular commentator for National Public Radio who had been fiercely critical of the Ceausescu regime, arrived in Bucharest with a radio crew in the days of the December 1989 revolt. On one level, his book is a travelogue. In crisp, often humorous detail, he describes his experiences and reactions on returning...