This impressive book grew from a doctorate “Mightier than the Sword, Polish Independent Publications, 1976–1989” gained at Georgetown University in 2013. Its key sources are uncensored publications collected at the time by the independent association KARTA and now held at its extensive “Opposition Archive” in Warsaw. The author sees these as the key link on the road to independence in 1989. Beginning as an organ of democratic opposition led by intellectuals, the uncensored press became an essential element in the formation of “civil society.” Siobhan Doucette argues that Poland was “the one country in the former Soviet bloc in which an active opposition transformed into a civil society that engineered the overthrow of the communist authorities” (255).

Western scholars had long been following Soviet samizdat (self-publication), seen as a unique means of evading state censorship and where possible, state repression, but Doucette argues that the independent publishing movement in Poland was unique. Instead of transcription by hand or typewriting, necessarily time-consuming and in small circulation, Polish opposition groups began to import printing machinery, thus facilitating circulation of unofficial material on a much wider scale. The machinery was transported from the west by ingenious methods. The first was smuggled by train from London to Lublin as part of luggage for the Catholic University's (KUL) international theater week. The émigré Polish Literary Institute in Paris provided a mimeograph that was smuggled into Poland across the Tatra Mountains.

The opposition press evolved after the state repression of workers protesting against food price increases in June 1976. The intellectual-led Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) began an Information Bulletin, and the journal Robotnik (Worker) played a key role in coordinating and monitoring public opinion as a prelude to the nationwide strike wave of 1980. During the August occupation of Gdańsk Shipyard, workers began to use the opposition's printing machines to spread news of the strikes and forge links across and between factories.

During Solidarity's sixteen months of legality that followed, the independent press was able to reach millions of new readers. In October 1980, student representatives from across Poland agreed to form an Independent Students’ Association (NZS). More than 200 independent serial publications were tied to NZS. Similarly, a number of independent farmers’ associations coalesced at a congress in December 1980. About one hundred serial titles were launched for farmers, some of them ephemeral. When the government imposed martial law in December 1981, Solidarity's press went underground and its authors who remained at liberty resorted to anonymity.

This leads to the book's principle thesis, that by the mid-80s the independent press was the essential element binding Polish society together. Together they broke the state's monopoly on information and contested the Marxist-Leninist state orthodoxy by expressing liberal, social-democratic, and nationalist ideas.

One important theme was previous Polish history. To reconstruct the history of Poles deported east during and after the Second World War, KARTA helped to create an “Archive of the East,” with a staff of seventy. By 1988, they had gathered some 130 personal memoires, including 450 hours of recordings with survivors. Particular attention was given to the Katyn massacre of 1940, when many thousands of Polish prisoners-of-war were slaughtered on Stalin's orders. Meanwhile, dramatic changes took place in current Polish-Soviet relations.

When Mikhail Gorbachev visited Warsaw in July 1988, university students dropped flyers and held banners demanding the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Poland. One may question the author's assertion that withdrawal would have happened without Gorbachev's “new thinking.” Gorbachev's recent memoires, translated as The New Russia (2016), record a close working-relationship with the Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski. During the visit, he encouraged Jaruzelski to introduce “a genuinely representative forum” to bring the government and opposition together. Thus began a series of Round Table negotiations which culminated with the peaceful end of Polish communism in June 1989; the Berlin Wall fell a few months later.