To Romania, with Love: Notes from a Country I Never Quite Left

How did a country that queued for bread in the 1980s end up selling software robots to the world? This is the story of how Romania learned to make money.

In communist Romania, money was rarely the hard part. The hard part was finding something to spend it on. Then the regime fell, the shops filled up, and Romanians had to learn capitalism without the instructions, with plenty of mischief along the way.

To Romania, with Love tells that story through the people who made fortunes and the ones who lost their savings. Inside:

A ring of bread that sells for 1.99 lei, and the chain that bakes it, now the biggest employer in Romania's food industry. In Romania, the bread ring has beaten the pig. A dictator who rationed a family's flat to the power of one 40-watt bulb while he built a palace of 1,100 rooms. Today couples hire one of its halls for their weddings, which makes for a long walk to the cake. West Germany paying Ceaușescu by the head for every German he let go, with graduates costing six times as much as workers. A degree raised what you could be sold for. A DIY empire that began in a shop the size of a parking space, with an M in its name for the founder's mother-in-law. A Bucharest company whose software robots have no arms, no legs and no faces, valued at 35 billion dollars. Its founder often doesn't get to the office until eleven. The robots start earlier. An anti-ageing cure from communist Romania that is still named in the laws of Nevada. Grilled sausages that Brussels forgot to allow. Romania went to war. Brussels waited for a form. It's funny, it's true, and every fact is sourced at the back.

Eleodor Sotropa grew up in Rădăuți, in Bucovina. He left for Toronto in 1995 and has lived in Cincinnati since 1999, but he has never quite left. This book is what he's sending.