Rumpalla

Rumpalla, Rummaging through Albania is a newspaperman's book. In it Lucas not only writes about his experiences traveling throughout the then-closed, tightly controlled Communist country in the late 1980s, but he tells the story through the eyes of a reporter. In 1986 he became the first American reporter to be allowed into the country in thirty years. Returning again and again, Lucas chronicled the changes the country went through as it broke away from the hard-line Communism of Joseph Stalin to join the rest of the nations of Europe as a fledgling democracy. In between, the writer found time to search for the site of a World War II American plane crash, find his father's abandoned village, trace the High Albania footsteps of early English traveler Edith Durham, and help Kosovar refugees during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. In between, searching for the heart of Albania, he got to know and interview Albanian peasants and presidents.