Rural Romania in the new capitalism: 1990-2020. Pro Universitaria, Bucharest, 2022. Iulian Stănescu & Flavius Mihalache (editors)

Authors and coordinators Stănescu Iulian and Mihalache Flavius capture a moving picture of the Romanian village, as it was inherited after the Romanian Revolution, transforming, and reinventing itself in an interesting story of an adventure between survival and authenticity of each land. The archetype of the Romanian peasant in the 21st century is the Odyssey of a lone wolf, alienated from the unitary vision of his mission of universality and at the same time motivated to live in the strangest challenges and in an endless European modernization. The coordination of such a volume is itself an adventure in the history of the most archaic place where Romanian-ness was born as a source of immortality and a return to the origins of a people tormented by the curse of finding own solutions to a global movement that has always caught it unprepared in its historical evolution. The authors who have subscribed to this volume are not just researchers, but voices that bring that mosaic of images to a complex picture, almost complete but never exhausted.