The former East Bloc has changed dramatically in the past twenty years. Two decades after publishing Poland in Transition: 1989-1991, Pichaske returns to Lodz, Poland, encountering a landscape both hauntingly familiar and very much transformed, now similar, despite urban-rural differences, to his home in southwestern Minnesota, and to the places many of us inhabit in a global economy which litters the planet with empty factories, crumbling apartments, abandoned barns and schools, ghost towns and forgotten cemeteries. In a series of elegiac meditations on these "ghosts of abandoned capacity"...