from Kombinat: Industrial Ruins of the Golden Era, courtesy igloo heritage

When I went to Romania shortly before the downfall of the Ceauşescu regime, the Romanians (to judge by the displays in the bookshops) seemed to be a nation of stereochemists: for displayed to the exclusion of almost everything else in the bookshop windows was a volume entitled The Stereospecific Characterization of Isoprene. Perhaps the authorship, or the alleged authorship, of this volume explained its strange popularity: that of Elena Ceauşescu, Doctor of Science and Member of the Romanian Academy.

I di ...