Starting out as a struggling, aspiring writer, Jan Vitek would go on to play a secret role in undermining the Czech communist party from within, a mission that would result in the kidnap of his wife and child and his own exile in Switzerland. He has battled political regimes and devastating illness with the same refined humility during a life marked equally by triumph and tragedy. Born in South Bohemia and coming of age during the Second World War, Vitek witnessed the liberation of the Czechoslovakia in 1945, the subsequent Communist takeover and the unbridled Capitalist transformation that many of the ex-communist states experienced following the revolutions of the late 1980s. His own life has been played out against a dramatic backdrop of a Europe in flux and his accounts of both his own experiences and this sweeping social change is illuminating. A Pebble in the Torrent is Jan Vitek's captivating and dramatic story of a man who said no to oppression and injustice.