Rumpalla

About the Book

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 Americana 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 fledging 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.

About the Author

Peter Lucas is a Boston newspaperman. He has worked as a political reporter and columnist for the Boston Herald, the Boston Globe and the Boston Phoenix, covering politics and political events in Massachusetts, Washingtron and across the United States. A seasoned reporter, Lucas has reported from Vietnam during the war, and has covered events in Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Hondorus, Panama as well as the troubles in Northern Ireland and the turmoil in the Balkans. He has interviewed peasants and presidents. He has traveled extensively throughout Europe and has been to Albania more than twenty times. He went into the U.S. Army during the tail end of the Korean War and served in Germany during the German Occupation. Lucas was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, grew up in the old West End of Boston, attended high school in nearby Somerville and graduated from Boston University. He makes his home in Lexington, Massachusetts.