Prior to reading Dracula Is Dead I had very little knowledge of Romania. I knew that Romanian is a romance language (thanks to my high school Spanish teacher) and I have heard of the Carpathian Mountains (thanks to the Left Behind series). I also have a vague recollection of hearing about the orphans of Romania when I was a teenager. The funny thing is that Dracula isn't one of the first things to pop into my mind when I think of Romania, so this title was a little bit cryptic to me at first. Thank goodness for the subtitle though! As subtitles go it's a long one, but it does a great job of detailing what you will find in this book.

Each of the facts and topics that I knew about and many, many more are discussed in Dracula is Dead. This book covers a lot of information. At times it reads like a memoir, as Sheilah and Jim relate their experiences with the people of Romania. Elsewhere time is spent describing the culture and the lay of the land. When historic figures are mentioned the authors usually give some pertinent details of the person's past and their place in Romanian history. The authors also try to help the reader understand the politics past and present of Romania (some of which is very confusing).

The book is divided geographically - each chapter dealing with a different region that Sheilah and Jim visited. I especially enjoyed reading the chapter on Transylvania about Vlad Tepes, the man who was the basis for Bram Stoker's Dracula. It was interesting to learn that for a long time the people of Romania hadn't heard of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and that Vlad Tepes was a bit of a folk hero to some Romanians.

Here are some of the other things I learned:

* I was astonished to learn that the visit of Pope John Paul II to Romania in 1999 was the first of a Roman Catholic Pope to an Orthodox country in over 900 years.

* The AIDS epidemic had a huge effect on the orphans in Romania.

* There are 4th of July celebrations in Romania.

* Bram Stoker's notes on his book Dracula "indicate he originally created a villain named Count Wampyr from Styria, in Austria." (Page 146)

* Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, a town in Romania.


I am partial to memoirs, so this book shines the brightest for me in the personal stories of the interactions that Sheilah and Jim had with the Romanians. However, for anyone interested in the political history of Romania there is a lot to like too. ( )

Written by reporter Sheilah Kast and her husband Jim Rosapepe, the US ambassador to Romania under President Clinton, this examination and explanation of the formerly communist country offers a view of the country that goes beyond Dracula, Romanian orphanages, and dictator Ceausescu. Kast and Rosepepe specifically set out to illuminate a country, defined by Americans, if they can define it at all, by just a few small bits of history and a now out of date media focus.

Organized regionally, with each chapter concentrating on a different region of the country, Kast and Rosapepe have combined a heavy emphasis on Romania's political history and the people running the country now on the national, regional, and local levels with some anecdotes about their travels through the country while Rosapepe served as the US Ambassador. They offer up not only a different look at Romania than the decayed post-Communist country so many Americans think of, but present Romania as a vibrant, changing, up and coming place full of culture and friendship.

While in some sense the organization fits the book, in other ways it was somewhat confusing as there was no sense of when some of the encounters were happening as each region was so self-contained in the text. Especially in terms of the people in power and politics as it was happening, a better sense of a timeline would have been helpful. The politics overwhelmed the travelogue and regular joe bits of the book as well. And perhaps this was inevitable given Rosapepe's job and the inability to meet people as anyone other than a foreign government official but it left me thinking that the Romania presented here is not the one that any other American would experience on a visit, an experience that would have been more interesting to me. Finally, I found it distracting, despite the explanation for it in the introduction, to have the point of view and narration change so precipitously, even within the same paragraph ranging from "Sheilah saw" to "Jim saw" to "we saw." This made for choppiness in the text and it probably wasn't strictly necessary for the reader to know exactly which of the authors had which experience. Or maybe it was and the choppiness was unavoidable. Still vaguely irritating though.

Over all, this was a good book about a little known to Americans, little understood country. I could have done with fewer political instances and more anecdotes but I am notoriously leery of any account of governmental politics, foreign or American. I also wish there had been more pictures of the actual people and places in Romania instead of just of Kast and Rosapepe in the country. I'll have to scour the internet for pictures of castles and churches, Bucharest and the countryside, the towns and the people. But in general, this is a book which will appeal to those who have a fascination with international politics and to those who want to know how a country decimated by Communism and a corrupt dictatorship is coming back from that heavy legacy. ( )