For most people in the West, the realities of life behind the Iron Curtain have faded into caricatures of police state repression and bread lines. With the world seemingly again divided between democracies and authoritarian regimes, it is essential that we understand the reality of life in the Soviet Bloc. American photojournalist Arthur Grace (born 1947) was uniquely placed to provide that context. During the 1970s and 1980s Grace traveled extensively behind the Iron Curtain, working primarily for news magazines. One of only a small corps of Western photographers with ongoing access, he was able to delve into the most ordinary corners of people's daily lives, while also covering significant events. Many of the photographs in this remarkable book are effectively psychological portraits that leave the viewer with a sense of the gamut of emotions in that era. Illustrated with over 120 black-and-white images-nearly all previously unpublished-Communism(s) gives an unprecedented glimpse behind the veil of a not-so-distant time filled with harsh realities unseen by nearly all but those that lived through it. Shot in the USSR, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia and the German Democratic Republic, here are portraits of factory workers, farmers, churchgoers, vacationers and loitering teens juxtaposed with the GDR's imposing Social Realist-designed apartment blocks, annual May Day Parades, Poland's Solidarity movement (and the subsequent imposition of martial law) and the vastness of Moscow's Red Square.

An award-winning photojournalist and social documentarian, Arthur Grace (born 1947) has traveled globally and to every region of America on assignment for major news organizations as well as for his own personal projects since the early 1970s. In "America 101," Grace draws 101 pictures from his rich personal archive to assemble a visual crash course on what defines and represents us as Americans. Organized here into thematic chapters, Grace's book plumbs America's cultural DNA, fusing the style and the physical proximity of a photojournalist with the conceptual distance and healthy skepticism of an artist. As High Museum of Art Curator of Photography, Brett Abbott, states in his introductory essay, "In Grace's America, the ordinary meets the absurd, veneration and irreverence comingle in unexpected and delightfully humorous ways, a lighthearted joie de vivre soothes a violent vein, and the sanctity of the individual competes with our continual drive toward collective direction."