Goodbye, Eastern Europe

November 1, 2022

The Guardian's Ireland correspondent, Carroll chronicles the IRA's attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher in October 1984 in There Will Be Fire. Published on Israel's 75th anniversary, two-time National Jewish Book Award winner Gordis's Impossible Takes Longer considers whether Israel's founders achieved their goal of creating a national homeland that would transform Jewish life (60,000-copy first printing). In 1742, a ship landed on Brazil's coast with 30 starving men feted as survivors of the wrecked British warship the Wager--until three months later, when three stragglers on another ship landing in Chile claimed the Wager's men were mutineers; from the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon). Chair of medieval history at King's College, London, Heather offers new reasons why Christendom grew from a tiny sect persecuted within foundering fourth-century CE Rome to the religion dominating Europe 1,000 years later. Celebrated Czech novelist Kundera, who has lived in France since 1975, argues that the "small nations" of Europe--e.g., Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Ukraine--are culturally rooted in Europe and under Soviet rule constituted A Kidnapped West (40,000-copy first printing). Following the LJ-starred The Crown in Crisis, which chronicled the Abdication Crisis of 1936, British historian Larman's The Windsors at War moves on to King George VI and the conflict within the Windsor family during World War II as the Duke of Windsor cozied up to Hitler (40,000-copy first printing). From leading South African political commentator Malala, The Plot To Save South Africa covers the 1993 assassination of Nelson Mandela's prot�g� Chris Hani by a white supremacist hoping to ignite a war, even as Mandela had begun power-sharing discussions with President FW de Klerk. Good-bye, Eastern Europe broadly documents the region briefly called Eastern Europe, moving from pre-Christian times through the great empires (Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian), the rise of communism and fascism, and the post-Soviet era to Russia's invasion of Ukraine; A Polish-born contributor to the Atlantic, has a PhD in Eastern European history from Berkeley (25,000-copy first printing). Granted special access by Queen Elizabeth II to her parents' letters and diaries and to the papers of close friends and family, Smith, the New York Times best-selling author of Elizabeth the Queen, aims to show how a loving marriage helped George VI and Elizabeth lead a nation through war (50,000-copy first printing). From Simon, a former senior director for Middle Eastern and North African Affairs on the National Security Council, Grand Delusion tracks the four decades of oil-driven U.S. involvement in the Middle East, begun by the Reagan administration and moving through Desert Storm (which he challenges) to the Obama administration's step back. The acclaimed Winchester leaps nimbly from cuneiform writings through Gutenberg to Google and Wikipedia as he examines Knowing What We Know--that is, how we acquire, retain, and pass on information--and how technology's current capability to do those things for us might be threatening our ability to think (100,000-copy first printing).

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 3, 2023
In this ambitious debut, journalist Mikanowski draws on his ancestral connections to Eastern Europe to deliver a stunning portrait of a “land of small states with complicated fates.” Highlighting the region’s diversity and his own Polish-Jewish-Catholic roots, Mikanowski surveys 1,000 years of tumultuous history, describing how pagan belief systems survived in Eastern Europe until the 1200s and the impact of the Holy Roman, Ottoman, and Habsburg empires, all of which ruled the region from a safe distance. Vivid sketches of religious sects such as the Hussites, followers of the Czech priest Jan Hus, brush up against insightful profiles of Eastern Europe’s many diasporic peoples, including nomadic Vlachs of the Balkan highlands, Sufi dervishes, and Romas. Describing his ancestral homeland as “a powder keg, a nest of assassins, a tangle of murderous animosities,” Mikanowski notes that in 1919 alone, six different armies battled in Ukraine, and Kiev changed hands five times. With Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia, and Romania allied to Nazi Germany during WWII, the Holocaust “effected a profound, almost metaphysical unraveling of the social fabric.” Following the war, the “brief elation and prolonged terror of Stalinism” evolved into an atmosphere of “stasis and scarcity” that settled over the Eastern Bloc until the 1990s, which saw the rise of Solidarity movement in Poland, the independence of former-Soviet republics, and the 1991–1995 war in Yugoslavia. Shot through with lyrical reflections and astute analysis, this is a rewarding portrait of diverse and complex part of the world.

April 15, 2023
An epic history of Eastern Europe, from pagan days to an uncertain future. Eastern Europe is a great arc of countries stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, although the names and number of them have varied over time. Indeed, some of the most striking parts of this book are the maps, which show how the boundaries within the region have changed over time. Mikanowski, a Portland, Oregon-based journalist, has traveled much of the territory, seeking traces of his half-Catholic, half-Jewish ancestry. The author covers centuries of empires rising and falling, pogroms and invasions, brutal dictators and snatches of artistic beauty. Most of the countries that currently exist were stitched together as geopolitical compromises, with the crosscutting cleavages of separate faiths, languages, and ethnic backgrounds. With so much history, the book could have easily become a dark, unwieldy canvas, but Mikanowski adds stories and personal anecdotes, many of them involving his own family, to provide a sense of balance. "This book is not a family history," he writes, "but my family history forms a braid running through it...my ancestors are at the root of everything I write." The author also delivers a few jokes along the way--e.g., "Eastern Europeans share one legacy in common, and that is a gift for seeing comedy in tragedy." The nadir was the Nazi era of occupation, although the Stalin period often rivaled the Nazi horrors. The collapse of the Soviet Union presaged a period of economic hardship, which slowly dissipated as capitalism took root. Mikanowski is not sure where the region is heading, but he asks the world to acknowledge its diversity and potential, and he proves to be a capable guide to countries and cultures that many readers may have never encountered. An informative study of a part of the world too often ignored, told with vigor, color, and authority.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from May 26, 2023

This phenomenal debut from journalist and historian Mikanowski is partly a nostalgic attempt to preserve the culture of a disappearing region and partly a boisterous defense of its legacy. The author argues that Eastern Europe should be understood less as a fragmented borderland and more as a place uniquely defined by its distinctiveness. From the surprisingly late emergence--around the year 1000 AD--of written history in Eastern Europe, a dizzying array of religious, ethnic, and political shifts have characterized life there. Mikanowski's text is divided into sections that focus on religion, the region's inhabitants, the empires that conquered it, and the 20th century, but the narrative is united through an emphasis on traditional stories, beliefs, and experiences. As a result, this yields a history of people, rather than a bird's-eye view of events. Stories from the author's family enrich an extensive archive of primary sources. VERDICT Combined with the author's gripping style, his sources make this an informative, deeply engaging take on an ever-shifting region. With Eastern Europe's traditional nations regrouping into Scandinavia, Central Europe, and Eastern Adriatic, this timely book will appeal to readers seeking a fresh take on European history.--Willem Marx

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.