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by Sergiu Viorel Urma (Author)
This intriguing memoir takes you inside Ceaușescu's Romania, where Sergiu Viorel Urma was the sole reporter for the Associated Press from 1974 through 1987.
Urma's narration begins in May 2014, when he returned to his native country for a chance to see the dossier compiled by the Securitate, Romania's version of the Soviet KGB. It had taken him nine years to access his folder. And now, he cannot believe his eyes...
Urma goes on to chronicle his eventful career path, taking readers back to his senior year at Bucharest University, the same year Moscow and its Eastern Bloc allies-with the exception of Romania-invade Czechoslovakia to stifle the Prague Spring.
In 1973, after a twenty-three-year period during which the Associated Press did not have a reporter in Romania, the agency opens a Bucharest bureau and hires Urma as an assistant. The following year, he becomes the only reporter working for a Western agency in the country-and the West is very curious to know what Ceaușescu is up to...
The newly surfaced dossier sheds light on Urma's time as a reporter in Romania, highlighting just how dangerous the political climate was during this fascinating chapter of modern history.
Author Biography
Sergiu Viorel Urma was born in Romania, where he earned an MA in English language and literature. After a two-year stint as a reporter for the state-run Radio Bucharest, he became a member of the Associated Press, first as an assistant and then as a correspondent from 1974 to 1987. After he was forced to leave the country by Romania's communist authorities, he worked in Austria as an AP reporter covering Eastern Europe and the anticommunist revolutions occurring there. Since arriving in the United States in 1990, he worked on AP's International Desk as an editor until 2014, when he retired after forty years with the company.
Urma is married and living in New Jersey. Screwed is his first book. His play, Chessgame, was published in 1996 by Modern International Drama, a magazine of contemporary international drama issued by Binghamton University, State University of New York.
