IN WONDERLAND: An American Journal, 1986

In January 1986, Romanian-born writer Crisula Stefanescu arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia, sent by Radio Free Europe for a semester at the University of Virginia. She came from Europe carrying one idea of America and found something far more complicated, surprising, generous and strange.Written night after night as it happened, In Wonderland: An American Journal, 1986 captures Reagan's America through the eyes of an outsider experiencing it for the first time: its abundance and loneliness, its universities and shopping malls, its customs and contradictions, and the small encounters that reveal more than any political analysis could.Against the larger backdrop of the Cold War, Stefanescu records everyday American life with curiosity, humor and an acute eye for detail. And when the Challenger disaster unfolds on a classroom television, history suddenly enters the intimate world of her journal.Published in English for the first time forty years after it was written, In Wonderland is both a personal memoir and a remarkable time capsule: America in 1986, preserved in the immediacy of someone seeing it with new eyes.