The Man They Killed on Christmas Day Paperback – July 29, 2013

Without following the news closely it can be hard to keep abreast of all the changes that have happend in my lifetime (and maybe yours) in Eastern Europe. This story brings home the impact to the folks who live there how a dictator affects the common people, the ones who just happen to abide in an area of the world that is unstable. Not a long read, its clear and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys history from a personal perspective.

I was 12 years old back in december 1989 when Revolution burst out.Christmas lost its magic.The riot in the street and the sound of fireguns shots replaced the magic with terror.Still, unvoiced joy made its way through adults'eyes, while an anxious silence grabbed everybody.Unlike adults, I experienced some kind of a paradoxal feeling of regret for the dethroned dictator.In school I was thaught to respect him. He was some kind of hero turning the very idea of justice into something touchable.All of a sudden the handsome, smiling man whose neverfailing portrait throned on every school classroom wall was caught. Strangely, on TV I saw he was old and helpless. I felt sorry for him.I wondered how was it possible for such old helpless man to have control over a country of people who hated him?? How was it still possible for us, the young ones to like him, though??Reading Catalin Gruia's book I came to get the whole picture and the explanations I needed to solve out the paradox.Catalin has the power to synthetise and restore a complicated long story by emphasizing the key moments and to equally provide the reader with the detailed and juicy insights to keep him / her on the edge of the seat.He has a great capacity to sense out the essential and combine journalistic objective narration with interesting reflections and surprising details.For instance, he draws attention on the enactment of a law replacing the term Mr./Mrs/MS with Comrade/Citizen or the law that limited the circulation of cars on Sunday by odd/vs/even plate numbers every other week.These may look like fiction stories, but were actually enacted and experienced in real life, less than 30 years ago.I found this book very useful and easy to read.I was answered questions I have asked myself and I have also found essential information hard to dig for and select on my own.

I did find this book interesting but as others have already mentioned, it tended to skim over the surface and we really needed more in depth details of social life, services etc. for the population at that period in time. I did note that there are Romanians now wishing they had the security they had during that period, housing, jobs food on the table and I have heard similar reports from other Eastern block countries. I also thought that it jumped about too much from different periods and would have been easier perhaps to understand this period better if the each chapter in the book had related to a period in time from his rise to power to Christmas Day.Living in Greece for 35 years has brought home to me just how closely related we in the Balkan countries are compared to Northern Europeans. I have found here that same sheep like attitude of following a leader that tells his people what they want to hear rather than the plain truth. Here in Greece it has always been the aim of the vast majority of Greeks to find a position in the public services rather than persue a career in private enterprise or even their own venture. Is this due to history, the instability in the respective countries that citizens seek security rather than to be adventurous and work to achieve a goal in life.Of course total power does corrupt and this is exactly the problems we have here in Greece and why we are living in a bankrupt country relying on loans. When there is only one House of Parliament and the Presidency is stripped of all power then of course the leaches are there to benefit themselves. The longer in power of any totalitarian leader, the more will gather to feed from the trough. These governments hand out positions to the faithful that keep them in power. This is why Democracy is so precious.Thanks Catalin, I do consider this book worth a read.

This is an utterly drab book written about a deeply, creepily interesting subject - Nicolae Ceaușescu - president of Romania, executed in 1989. I have no doubt that Ceaușescu and his wife deserved the end they got, but there's no way to know that from reading this book. It pretty much could have been written directly from the Encyclopedia Britannica and has approximately that much emotional weight. Ceaușescu is one of the most hated dictators of the 20th century, and that's saying a lot, yet from this little (fortunately short) book we don't learn anything except statistics. Yeah he caused to have built the largest and most extravagant public building after the Pentagon while his people didn't have enough to eat. This indicates the level of his depravity but again, not the human cost of it. There's a forward and afterward on the book that are better written and more interesting than the rest of it, plus a silly psychological study of Ceaușescu which explains nothing. I gave it a whole extra star since I'm interested in Romania.

This was a balanced and insightful account of the rise of a peasant's son to the dictatorship of communist Romania. I would have giving the book 5 stars, but based on the title, I was hoping that the author would expose more about those that executed Ceausescu and his wife and then proceeded to steal their way to wealth at the expense of the Romania people. Perhaps it is still too dangerous for that.

Poorly written. Reads more like a uni essay rather than a nitty gritty factual account. I found it hard to imagine the man, and or his life. I have met Romanians who have given evocative memories of this man and his times, but this book does little of that