Hardcover
896 Pages, 6.39 x 9.47 x 1.73 in
August 7, 2007
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
0375424954
9780375424953
From the Publisher
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.
But Mak is above all an observer. He describes what he sees at
places that have become Europe's wellsprings of memory, where
history is written into the landscape. At Ypres, he hears the blast
of munitions from the Great War that are still detonated there
twice a day. In Warsaw, he finds the point where the tram rails
that led to the Jewish ghetto come to a dead end in a city park.
And in an abandoned nursery school near Chernobyl, where tiny pairs
of shoes still stand in neat rows, he is transported back to the
moment time stood still in the dying days of the Soviet Union.
Mak combines the larger story of twentieth-century Europe with
details that give it a face, a taste and a smell. His unique
approach makes the reader an eyewitness to a half-forgotten past,
full of unknown peculiarities, sudden insights and touching
encounters. In Europe is a masterpiece; it reads like the
epic novel of Europe's most extraordinary century.
From the Jacket
"Twentieth-century history is sober business, yet In
Europe is practically effervescent in its evocation of detail.
Mak doesn't write about Auschwitz and the ethnically cleansed
alleys of Srebrenica so much as personally lead you among the
concrete walls of these places that have shaped our
self-awareness."
--Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the
World
"Fascinating, informative, sometimes exhilarating, often
painful, and quite impossible to summarise... A wonderfully rich
journey through time and space, packed with vivid images, enlivened
by conversations and stories."
--The Literary Review
"A people's history that does not shy away from the bigger
questions posed in the wake of two world wars... The real
achievement here is not the unearthing of these nuggets of
anecdotal history but the skill with which Mak sets them in
context."
--The Herald
"A formidable achievement."
--Jan Morris
"Geert Mak is Europe's portrait-painter, its impressionist, its
poet-musician, the reader of its people's minds. Pray, read his
book!"
--John Lucas, author of June 1941: Hitler and Stalin
"It's impossible not to get drawn into this book.
--The Sunday Telegraph
About the Author
Geert Mak is among the most popular writers in the
Netherlands, author of numerous bestselling books of non-fiction.
He lives in Amsterdam.