Pacepa’s book understandably concentratesnon aspects of Romanian devilrynwhich are of interest to Americannreaders. One of these is Ceausescu’snflirtation with Qaddafi, when the Libyannwas overflowing with oil revenues.nThe crafty Romanian president managednto wheedle promises of Libyannmoney to finance no less than three oilnrefineries along the Black Sea shoreline.nCeausescu also extracted Libyannfunds to construct a whole series ofntanks based on the West Germann”Leopard” (the designs of which hadnbeen “lifted” by Pacepa’s IntelligencenService). But little seems to have comenof all this cooperation; the money wasnwasted, as has happened with so manynof Ceausescu’s schemes. He saw Romanianas a vast supplier of stolennWestern-designed armaments. He alsonsaw himself as the winner of the NobelnPrize for having mediated betweennArafat and Golda Meir, but all henachieved was preventing Golda’s assassinationnwhile she was in Bucharest.nCeausescu paid no less than fournstate visits to the USA—in 1970,n1973, 1975, and 1978. Posing as annindependent within the Warsaw bloc,nhe secured the “most-favored nation”nstatus for Romanian trade while at thensame time having his engineers acquirendesigns from the US, notably in electronics,nwhich were then passed on tonthe USSR. Napoleonic in his vision ofnhis role on the world stage, he sawnhimself not only as intermediary betweennZionists and Arabs but evennbetween the two superpowers. However,nhis appalling human rights recordneventually destroyed his image in thenUS, largely thanks to the presence ofn300,000 Romanians who have immigratednhere, many to escape his tyranny.nWhen they gathered outside the WaldorfnAstoria on his last visit shoutingn”Ceausescu—Idi Aminu,” pelting hisncar with eggs and tomatoes, he escapednto his suite by the back entrance andnvomited. Like most bully-dictators,nCeausescu is no hero; while visitingnDallas he could not sleep all night fornthe fear of being assassinated like JohnnKennedy. Revelations about his corruption,nbrutality, and incompetence bynRomanian dissidents on Radio FreenEurope have thrown him into such ragenthat he has ordered the immediatenmurder of the broadcasters. These kill­nings, Pacepa says, are not carried out bynRomanians, but by Mafia thugs recruitednall over Europe to take part innRomania’s cocaine trade.nPerhaps it is the drug-running thatnwill be Ceausescu’s final undoing —nthis windfall from the Near East, withnwhich he has maintained such closencontact. Ceausescu has five palaces andna special residence in each of thencountry’s 39 provinces; he has a fleet ofnprivate planes that exceeds that at thendisposal of Queen Elizabeth and hernfamily; he has special trains, and evennfour special ambulances standing by atnall times, in case he may need them. Henhas placed his brothers in the top positionsnin the country; his younger sonnNicu, a drunken lout by all accounts,nhas unlimited prerogatives, and his wife.nON ESSAInREVISIONSnFor Montaigne they were little “attempts,”nand for us it is much the same.nOn essai, or “we’re trying” — such isnthe state of the essay today, although thenform has fallen out of favor, as AnnienDillard points out in her introduction tonThe Best Essays of 1988 (Ticknor &nFields, 328 pp., paper, $8.95).nIn or out of favor, the essay hasn’tndied, not while there are books tonreview and magazine-length news reportsnto write, not while The New YorknReview of Books smells blood, and thenlittle magazines keep getting funding.nBut essays lack that certain je ne saisnquoi, the panache of fiction. Who evernheard of this year’s new hot youngnessayist? (In general it is not a form fornyounger writers, though Dillard wasnherself an exception.) Nobody believesnanymore that truth is stranger thannfiction, or even that truth is more truthful.nYet, as Dillard points out in hernintroduction: “Veracity isn’t much of andrawback to the writer; there’s a lot ofntruth out there to work with.” Besides,nshe writes, “[t]he essay can do everythingna poem can do, and everythingna short story can do — everything butnfake it.”nAnnie Dillard is fighting to save thenfarm, and in picking her as this year’snguest editor, the folks at Ticknor &nFields garnered themselves one of thenbest essayists around. At 27 she publishednher first book. Pilgrim at TinkernCreek, a volume of beautifully interwovennessays that not only won a Pulit­nnnElena, to believe Pacepa, runs the internalnaffairs of the country while he triesnto strut the world stage as an unwantednmediator. Cormption, personal aggrandizement,ntyranny: these are features ofnalmost all despotisms. Ugly, vicious, andncmel as they are, it has become acceptednthat these vices are not sufficientngrounds for external interference. Butndrug-dealing — passing cocaine fromnthe Near East in Romanian T.I.R.ntrucks to Western Europe — that is anothernmatter. If this vice is enough toncause the civilized world to take actionnagainst General Noriega of Panama,nthen Ceausescu’s days may be numbered.nWe should all be grateful tonPacepa for revealing this disgracefulnracket.nzer but deserved it, and the collectionsnof essays that followed—Holy the Firm,nTickets for a Prayer Wheel, and Encountersnwith Chinese Writers—shownher to be nonpareil. In general I shynaway from formula books, but there’snnothing like getting a good writer tonchoose for you to enliven a collection ofn”the best of”nIncluded here are George Garrett, inna nice memoir, “My Two One-EyednCoaches.” “. . . Well, now, you arensurely thinking,” he writes. “All of thatnmust have been wonderful training for anlife in the American literary world: hardnknocks, massive confusion, fake punts,nfake passes, and fake field goals, ceaselessntrickery and treachery; and all of itndepending on luck, on pure dumbnluck. . . . And, once in a while, onncoaching.”nThere is another nice autobiographicalnpiece by William Kittredge,n”Home,” originally published by GraywolfnThere is a more reportage-ishnessay by the excellent Richard Selzer,nwhose piece on AIDS in Haiti, “AnMask on the Face of Death,” was donenfor Life. There is even a so-so piece bynCanadian Anne Carson, but thennAmerica has been annexing so-so Canadiannliterature for years now.nWhat “the best of” books are goodnfor is giving the Gentle Reader a windownon the year in letters. Too oftennsuch windows look out upon a bricknwall. It’s always nice to be remindednthat there are writers around—some ofnthem even making a living writing—nwho provide us with a view. (KD)nJANUARY 1989/33n