Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite

Screwed: Dancing with the Generals by Sergiu Viorel Urma is a historical memoir, an autobiography of Urma, a reporter for The Associated Press news agency in Communist Romania. Urma spent forty years as an Associated Press reporter in Romania, Eastern Europe, and in the US. The book starts with Urma sitting in the reading room of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives in Bucharest. As he looks over the now-public dossier of his movements — the secret police files — recorded by Communist Romania's Department of State Security, the secret police agency of Communist Romania, we catapult into Urma's tale on the subversive relationships, political pandering, torture, and all the trappings of a heavy-handed marriage between the Communist machine and the press.

Sergiu Viorel Urma has written a tense memoir with Screwed: Dancing with the Generals, and he doesn't hold back in his revelations of the first-hand facts presented in his harrowing autobiography. At about 200 pages in the hands of a prolific reader, I should have been able to finish this book in a single sitting. Not so with Screwed. Urma has provided a trove of information so extensive and disturbing that I was forced to set it down after consuming only a handful of pages, and it ultimately took me a week and a half to finish. This had nothing to do with the writing itself; on the contrary, the subject matter is effectively conveyed in a believable, well written script, and so intense that it was impossible to process in a short span of time. This little book packs a whopper of a punch, and I strongly recommend it to anyone with interests in ambitious and inspiring stories of professional integrity and personal survival.