Flight

Rasa Gustaitis, who was a child when she fled Lithuania and came to America, centers this compelling historical memoir on her pursuit of traces of her father, last known to be in a grim Soviet prison. A lifelong journalist, the author follows four generations of a family caught up in the tumultuous history of Eastern Europe, beginning with the childhoods of her extraordinary parents and continuing to the Singing Revolution that liberated one small, defiant country from the grip of the USSR. Flight is eye-opening, the story of a little-examined landscape within a war that changed the world. The author paints the details of everyday life with poignancy and joy, while placing individual lives within the grand sweep of history. Like all the best accounts of the past, this beautifully written book leaves us with food for thought about our own lives and times.