In the Fall of 1943, 30 members of the 807th Medical Air Evacuation Squadron were stranded behind enemy lines. For the next 62 days they would try to find their way back. Sgt. Lawrence Abbott, rarely spoke of his WWII experiences to anyone. Years after he passed away, an unpublished manuscript he wrote in 1945, was found, detailing this experience. The story is now available for all to learn about.
Analysing the post-1990 Albanian migration to Italy, this text is a study of one of Europe's newest, most dramatic yet least understood migrations. It explores the dynamics of this migration and takes a look at migrants' employment, housing and social exclusion in the country, as well as the process of return migration to Albania.
In the early 1990s, Albania, arguably Europe’s most closed and repressive state, began a startling transition out of forty years of self-imposed Communist isolation. Albanians who were not allowed to practice religion, travel abroad, wear jeans, or read “decadent” Western literature began to devour the outside world. They opened cafés, companies, and newspapers. Previously banned rock music blared in the streets. Modern Albania offers a vivid history of the Albanian Communist regime’s fall and the trials and tribulations that led the country to become the state it is today. The book provides an in-depth look at the Communists' last Politburo meetings and the first student revolts, the fall of the Stalinist regime, the outflows of refugees, the crash of the massive pyramid-loan schemes, the war in neighboring Kosovo, and Albania’s relationship with the United States. Fred Abrahams weaves together personal experience from more than twenty years of work in Albania, interviews with key Albanians and foreigners who played a role in the country’s politics since 1990—including former Politburo members, opposition leaders, intelligence agents, diplomats, and founders of the Kosovo Liberation Army—and a close examination of hundreds of previously secret government records from Albania and the United States. A rich, narratively-driven account, Modern Albania gives readers a front-row seat to the dramatic events of the last battle of Cold War Europe.
On November 8, 1943, U.S. Army nurse Agnes Jensen stepped out of a cold rain in Catania, Sicily, into a C-53 transport plane. But she and twelve other nurses never arrived in Bari, Italy, where they were to transport wounded soldiers to hospitals farther from the front lines. A violent storm and pursuit by German Messerschmitts led to a crash landing in a remote part of Albania, leaving the nurses, their team of medics, and the flight crew stranded in Nazi-occupied territory. What followed was a dangerous nine-week game of hide-and-seek with the enemy, a situation President Roosevelt monitored daily. Albanian partisans aided the stranded Americans in the search for a British Intelligence Mission, and the group began a long and hazardous journey to the Adriatic coast. During the following weeks, they crossed Albania's second highest mountain in a blizzard, were strafed by German planes, managed to flee a town moments before it was bombed, and watched helplessly as an attempt to airlift them out was foiled by Nazi forces. Albanian Escape is the suspense-filled story of the only group of Army flight nurses to have spent any length of time in occupied territory during World War II. The nurses and flight crew endured frigid weather, survived on little food, and literally wore out their shoes trekking across the rugged countryside. Thrust into a perilous situation and determined to survive, these women found courage and strength in each other and in the kindness of Albanians and guerrillas who hid them from the Germans.
Written by an insider and Albania enthusiast, the Bradt guide to Albania takes a fresh look at how and where to explore the heritage of this hidden corner of eastern Europe.
What do the people of Albania do for fun? What languages do they speak? What do they eat? Readers discover the answers to these questions and many more about life in Albania. They'll explore detailed text that includes the most current information and most fascinating facts. The history, government, geography, and cultural landscape of Albania is presented in an accessible and engaging way, along with helpful maps, informative sidebars, and fun recipes featuring delicious Albanian delicacies. This exercise in world history and cultural appreciation is also filled with full-color photographs of Albania's natural beauty and its proud citizens.
Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award The Sunday Times Best Book of the Year in Biography and Memoir A Financial Times Best Book of 2021 (Critics' Picks) The New Yorker, Best Books We Read in 2021 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021 A Guardian Best Book of the Year A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans. For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one’s individual future. When Lea’s parents spoke of relatives going to “university” or “graduating,” they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And when the early ’90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the “free market,” Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world’s most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.
Broken Narrative provides an extensive reflection on history, politics, and contemporary art, revolving around the cornerstones of the artistic practice of Albanian artist Armando Lulaj. The core of the book is formed by and extended interview of Lulaj by Italian artist and writer Marco Mazzi. This inquiry starts in the year 1997, a year of social and political upheaval in Albania, of anarchy, controversies and emigration, of toxic seeds of neoliberalism sprouting in an already wounded country, and continues to the present day, where politics, hidden behind art forms, has practically destroyed (again) every different and possible future of the country. This book also sketches out a connection between the recent Albanian political context and contemporary art by considering the realities of Albania as essential for an understanding of the dynamics of international power in contemporary art and architecture, and the role of politics therein. Broken Narrative comes in a bilingual English-Japanese edition, in part as homage to the subtle esthetics of Japanese poetry, which has inspired many of the Lulaj's works, while equally evoking the subversive films of the Red Army, active in Japan at the turn of the 1960s and '70s. Broken Narrative contains a double preface in English by Albanian scholar Jonida Gashi and in Japanese by photographer Osamu Kanemura. Armando Lulaj was born in Tirana in 1980. He is a writer of plays, texts on risk territories, filmmaker, and producer of conflict images. He's research is orientated towards accentuating the border between economical power, fictional democracy, and social disparity in a global context. His main topics of interest remain power, corruption and institutional critique. Lulaj has participated in many international exhibitions and film festivals. His works are part of various important private and public collections. Armando Lulaj is one of the founders of DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art. Marco Mazzi (1980) is an Italian photographer and writer living and working between Florence, Tokyo, and Tirana. Mazzi studied Contemporary Literature at the University of Florence and has also studied Japanese avant-garde art and visual poetry in Japan. In 2008, Mazzi founded the non-profit organization Relational Cinema Association within the University of Waseda in Tokyo. Mazzi was photographer-in-residence at The Department of Eagles (Tirana, Albania) during the conference Pedagogies of Disaster and for the project Lapidari, and he was the stage and still photographer for Armando Lulaj's Recapitulation (2015), commissioned by the 2015 Venice Biennale' s Albanian Pavilion.
