New Travel Book: ‘In Europe’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 08.16.07 | 3:29 PM ET
Full title: “In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century”
Author: Geert Mak, a Dutch journalist, historian and the author of “Jorwerd: The Death of the Village in Late Twentieth-Century Europe” and “Doomed to Vulnerability”
Released: Aug. 7, 2007 (English translation)
Travel genre: Modern history/column collection
Territory covered: Europe
Promo copy: “Geert Mak spent the year of 1999 criss-crossing the continent, tracing the history of Europe from Verdun to Berlin, Saint Petersburg to Auschwitz, Kiev to Srebrenica. He set off in search of evidence and witnesses, looking to define the condition of Europe at the verge of a new millennium. The result is mesmerizing: Mak’s rare double talent as a sharp-eyed journalist and a hugely imaginative historian makes ‘In Europe’ a dazzling account of that journey, full of diaries, newspaper reports and memoirs, and the voices of prominent figures and unknown players; from the grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II to Adrinana Warno in Poland, with her job at the gates of the camp at Birkenau.”
Critical verdict, Zagat-style: “‘In Europe’ hardly breaks new ground historically,” but Mak “has a great eye for telling detail, whether it is a single mouldy rose on Salazar’s grave ... or the young Vladimir Putin trying to burn so many files in the KGB office in Dresden in 1989 that the stove exploded” (Guardian). His “firsthand witnesses deliver us ... harrowingly into the past” (New York Sun), and though “Mak is above all else an observer and his story of 20th-century Europe is filled with details and insight that give it a face, a taste and a smell ... this is not exactly light summer reading, but it’s well worth the effort” (Tucson Citizen).
Find it: Amazon, Powell’s, Pantheon.
Related on World Hum:
* New Travel Book: ‘The Year of the Goat’
* New Travel Book: ‘Led Zeppelin Crashed Here’
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
