This title features stunning photos augmented by J. Hoberman's preface and Katarzyna Marciniak's essays. This powerful presentation of photographs of Poland from the late 1980s to the present depicts the hybridized landscape of this pivotal Eastern European nation following its entry into the European Union. A visual record of the country's transition from socialism to capitalism, it focuses on the industrial blue-collar city of Lodz - located in the heart of New Europe and home to nearly one million people. Photographer Kamil Turowski's pictures are captivating - seeming to conceal a looming threat - while Katarzyna Marciniak's accompanying text expands on the photos and the 'crocodilian' texture of contemporary Eastern Europe. A walk on the wild side, Streets of Crocodiles captures viscerally the changing landscape of postsocialist Poland.

"In the evening I had to prepare food and cook supper, which exhausted me totally. In politics there's absolutely nothing new. Again, out of impatience I feel myself beginning to fall into melancholy. There is really no way out of this for us." This is Dawid Sierakowiak's final diary entry. Soon after writing it, the young author died of tuberculosis, exhaustion, and starvation--the Holocaust syndrome known as "ghetto disease."

After the liberation of the Lódz Ghetto, Dawid's notebooks were found stacked on a cookstove, ready to be burned for heat. Young Sierakowiak was one of more than 60,000 Jews who perished in that notorious urban slave camp, a man-made hell which was the longest surviving concentration of Jews in Nazi Europe. The diary comprises a remarkable legacy left to humanity by its teenage author. It is one of the most fastidiously detailed accounts ever rendered of modern life in human bondage.

The luxury of life was never returned to Dawid, but a new awareness of its richness can be our reward for reading the diary of this brilliantly deserving and brutally deprived young human being.