In a departure from my usual fare, Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America is a work of non-fiction by ABC correspondent Kati Marton. This memoir recounts Marton’s journey into her parents’ past when her insatiable yearning for the truth prompts her to request her parents’ AVO files (the AVO being Cold War communist Hungary’s secret police). Before she was granted access, Marton was warned that reading the AVO’s copious files would open for her a Pandora’s box, and so it did – not regarding the AVO’s nefarious activities in the name of “protecting” Hungary’s interests, but regarding her own parents’ willingness to bend, in the end, to accommodate them.

Enemies of the People offers insights into a time and place largely unfamiliar to most Americans. And though my own interest in this subject was heightened by a recent visit to Hungary – during which I gained some understanding of its history – I was surprised to learn how very little I really knew.

I found myself reading and rereading passages, trying to absorb them – not because they were ill-written (they’re not; the book is written with a journalist’s incisive finesse), but because what is recorded seemed so unbelievable. True, I wasn’t interested in all the detailed minutia that Marton includes to support her account, and I was surprised to find a journalist lapsing often into self-conscious sentimentality – a hazard, I suppose, of writing about a painful subject so near to one’s heart. I did appreciate, however, the abundance of family photos, which help to tell the tale – many of which Morton obtained from AVO files.

I suspect that even those familiar with Cold War Europe will find something to intrigue them in these pages. Marton’s memoir is by turn gut-wrenching and eye-opening, and most readers will find it worth a peek.