Central Europe Books - Page 3

Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II

Ivan T. Berend

List Price: $55.00 By: University of California Press Amazon Marketplace: 39 new & used starting at $5.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Economics -> Economic History
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Central Europe
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Eastern

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Only by understanding Central and Eastern Europe's turbulent history during the first half of the twentieth century can we hope to make sense of the conflicts and crises that have followed World War II and, after that, the collapse of Soviet-controlled state socialism. Ivan Berend looks closely at the fateful decades preceding World War II and at twelve countries whose absence from the roster of major players was enough in itself, he says, to precipitate much of the turmoil.
As waves of modernization swept over Europe, the less developed countries on the periphery tried with little or no success to imitate Western capitalism and liberalism. Instead they remained, as Berend shows, rural, agrarian societies notable for the tenacious survival of feudal and aristocratic institutions. In that context of frustration and disappointment, rebellion was inevitable. Berend leads the reader skillfully through the maze of social, cultural, economic, and political changes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and the Soviet Union, showing how every path ended in dictatorship and despotism by the start of World War II.

The War of the Austrian Succession

Reed Browning

List Price: $69.95 By: St. Martin's Press Amazon Marketplace: 23 new & used starting at $5.55

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Austria
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Central Europe
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Good story 3 out of 5 stars.
12 of 14 people found this review helpful.

I read this book because I knew nothing about the mid-eighteenth century in Europe, and I found the story to fascinating. I could have done with some decent maps. Those in the book could have been sketched by a four-year-old. No legends. Few labels. Forget trying to put them in any spacial context with the continent. Locating a town, river or natural feature that is central to the story is successful maybe 20% of the time.

The author's style, pompous and condescending, really got on my nerves. The hit rate for his attempts at irony and humor is also in the 20% range. I don't mind not knowing details, names, historical facts that he alludes to, as I said, I knew nothing when I picked up the book. He seems to be intentionally unhelpful, keeping the reader off balance as his narrative meanders. Characters and places appear suddenly with no introduction. If he were my instructor, I would be wary of trick questions on the exam.

Editorial Review:

Browning provides a highly readable, coherent narrative of a complex period which fundamentally shaped the European state system. He explores the often-changing war aims of the major belligerents--Austria, France, Great Britain, Prussia, Piedmont-Sardinia, and Spain--and links diplomatic and military events to the political and social context from which they arose. Maps.

Disturbing The Peace

Vaclav Havel

List Price: $19.95 By: Knopf Amazon Marketplace: 93 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General AAS
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Central Europe

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Human-Centric Self-Governance--Take Back the Power 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 23 people found this review helpful.

Edit of 17 Apr 08 to add links.

This book should be read as an adjunct to the author's other major book along these lines on power to the powerless.

The most gripping and troubling conclusion that I drew from this book is that the United States of America is today much closer to where Czechoslovakia was in 1968 than anyone other than the Chomsky's and Vidal's might be willing to admit. We have both a federal government and a national corporate economy that thrives on elitist secrecy and blatant lies--even our non-profit sector is corrupt, from the Red Cross to United Way to many others. The people, the citizen-voters, truly have lost all power, as well as access to the information that might give them back the power, and this is indeed a black, absurdist-realist situation.

On a more positive note, the author offers up, in the course of a long series of interviews, a number of ideas that are relevant to America today, as well as to any other emerging or re-emergent democracies in the making.

1) Model of behavior. When arguing with the center of power, do not get side-tracked with ideological debates over right or wrong. Focus on very specific concrete things (e.g. term limits, campaign finance reform, neighborhood economics) and stick to your guns.

2) Popular coalitions. Non-violent non-partisan popular coalitions are the core means of taking back the power. They represent a means for bring together groups of people from widely divergent backgrounds, with genuine social tolerance.

3) Informal networks. Even under conditions of repression and censorship, informal networks of dissidents and quasi-dissidents can be effective in sharing information through samizdat publications. [With the Internet, these possibilities explode, although caution must be taken on the fringes since the Internet is easily monitored and the more radical leaders could be declared seditionist "combatants" ineligible for their rights as citizens...speaking of the Soviet Union, of course, not America.]

4) Man versus Machine. Havel reaches his own conclusions founded in Czech literature and his own experience, with respect to the urgency of restoring the kinship and human connections that used to drive politics, economics, and other aspects of organized living. He is at one with Lionel Tiger among many others, with respect to the terribly consequences of the industrial era in terms of de-humanizing decision-making and allowing remote elites to treat individual workers as dispensable cogs in the machine, whose lives matter not a whit.

5) Neighborhoods, Politics "From Below". He joins the authors of the Cultural Creatives (Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson) and of IMAGINE: What America Could be in the 21st Century (Marianne Williamson) in emphasizing the vital role that neighborhoods must play in any democracy. From political self-governance to sustainable economics to low-cost healthy agriculture to cultural cohesion, neighborhoods are the sin qua non of democracy--without active neighborhoods, one can go so far as to say, national democracy is a sham, a false theater, fully equivalent to the centralized, repressive, inefficient totalitarian control states of earlier eras.

6) Small Numbers Can Make a Difference. I was struck by how few were the original dissidents and organizers--in some cases, 20-30 in number, in others 70-80. Earlier studies have suggested that Hitler took power over millions with just 25,000 people. One can only hope that the anti-thesis is true, and that the 50 million cultural creatives can take back the power by getting serious about organizing across neighborhoods and into a national network.

7) Art and theater matter. Even under conditions of severe censorship and control, art and theater can be the manifestation of uncensored life, "life that spits on all ideology and all that lofty word of babble; a life that intrinsically resist(s) all forms of violence, all interpretations, all directives....here stood truth..."

8) Absurdity is a warning. Nihilistic and absurd theater or other works of art are a caution. They "do not offer us consolation or hope (but) merely remind( ) us of how we are living: without hope.

9) Truth can be misappropriated. The author experienced the misappropriation of his words and was both hurt and enlightened, ultimately creating a play about truth, the circumstances in which it is said, and the whom, why, and how of it.

10) Great men doubt themselves. Most touching are the author's many retrospective and current references to his insecurities, to his doubting himself even as he made history and became President of Czechoslovakia.

11) Writers live to tell the truth. This is certainly not true of most American writers who write for money, but it reflects the ideal and merits thought.

12) Change the atmosphere. If you can do nothing else, strive for a moral mobilization and a change in the atmosphere of governance, at any level. We cannot even begin to conceive the magnitude of the positive changes that can occur overnight if the people begin to speak truth among themselves. Work toward a process "in which people's civic backbones (begin) to straighten again."

13) Role of the intellectual. While I the reviewer would churlishly doubt that America has many intellectuals right now, the author's concluding words on the role of the intellectual strike me as very important: "...the intellectual should constantly disturb, should bear witness to the misery of the world, should be provocative by being independent, should rebel against all hidden and open pressure and manipulations, should be the chief doubter of systems, of power and its incantations, should be a witness to their mendacity."

Any person concerned about the corruption and misdirection of their government and their corporate as well as non-profit entities, will be provoked and inspired by this book. It speaks to the future of human life as it might be, were we willing to stand up straight and be counted at citizen-voters, active at every level beginning with our own neighborhoods.

Living in Truth: 22 Essays Published on the Occasion of the Award of the Erasmus Prize to Vaclav Havel
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Editorial Review:

An intimate history of Czechoslovakia under communism; a meditation on the social and political role of art, and a triumphant statement of the values underlying all the recent revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe.

Central and East European Politics: From Communism to Democracy

Jane L. Curry

Amazon Price: $39.95 List Price: $39.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Amazon Marketplace: 22 new & used starting at $26.57

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Central Europe
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Eastern
Subjects -> History -> Russia

Editorial Review:

This long-needed text explores the other half of Europe--the new and future members of the European Union along with the problems and potential they bring to the region and to the world stage. Clear and comprehensive, it offers an authoritative and up-to-date analysis of the transformations and realities in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics, and Ukraine. The book presents a set of comparative country case studies as well as thematic chapters on key issues, including EU and NATO expansion, the economic transition and its social ramifications, the role of women, persistent problems of ethnicity and nationalism, and political reform. For students and specialists alike, this book will be an invaluable resource on the newly democratizing states of Europe.

Readings in European History 1789 to the Present: A Collection of Primary Sources

John L. Heineman

List Price: $65.58 By: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company Amazon Marketplace: 20 new & used starting at $2.71

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Central Europe
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> General
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> General AAS

Bohemia in History

Amazon Price: $130.00 List Price: $130.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Cambridge University Press Amazon Marketplace: 22 new & used starting at $122.22

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Central Europe
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Czech Republic
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> England -> General

Editorial Review:

This original collection of essays offers an account of key moments and themes in the history of the Czech Lands from the ninth century to the fall of socialism in 1989. The essays, commissioned specially for this volume, are almost all written by prominent scholars teaching and researching in the present-day Czech Republic, and there is no comparable book in English on the subject. Topics range from the great Bohemian courts of the medieval and early modern periods, to the nationalist revival, and the dramatic ethnic upheavals of modern times.

The Prague Spring and its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968-1970

Kieran Williams

List Price: $64.95 By: Cambridge University Press Amazon Marketplace: 2 new & used starting at $100.38

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Central Europe
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Czech Republic
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Germany -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Necessary for those who teach or study the Prague Spring. 4 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

Kieran Williams has produced the best available summary and analysis of the high politics of the Prague Spring and the "normalization" which followed the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia of August 1968. While the book is of an appropriate length and style for interested readers and undergraduates, its impressive use of archival materials (in Russian, Czech, Slovak, and German) and its careful argumentation make it required reading for historians and political scientists as well. Williams succeeds in unpacking the various components of Czechoslovak reform communism, in explaining the ways in which Dubcek and his allies violated Soviet expectations, and in describing the creep of "normalization." In so doing, he dissolves several myths. No reader of this book will believe that the Soviet-led intervention was an immediate success, nor that Czechs and Slovaks lacked the idealism needed to resist communism. Williams reminds us that Dubcek was in power for as long after the invasion as he was before it, and that "normalization" began with the voluntary compromises by society which he requested. Williams also demonstrates a good sense of proportion: he uses theories of political sciences, but has clearly selected from a wide corpus rather than relying upon what is presently fashionable; he points up where previous analysis were mistaken, but does so economically; he compares reform communism in Czechoslovakia to that of Gorbachev, but without pressing the point; he describes the brutality of the Soviet occupiers, while letting the details speak for themselves. Some of the book's specific arguments are unpersuasive, and its major flaw is the lack of an introduction that would remind the reader of the major events to be discussed, and of a conclusion which would review the major arguments, emphasize what is new in the analysis, and recount how theories of political science relate to the narrative. All in all, however, an excellent book.

Editorial Review:

The Prague Spring of 1968 was among the most important episodes in postwar European politics--one of the few pre-Gorbachev attempts to reform one-party communist rule. In this book Kieran Williams analyzes the attempt at reform under Alexander Dubcek and its suppression by the Soviet Union, using archive materials and other sources that have become available in the wake of the 1989 revolution. The book will provide new information for specialists as well as introductory analysis and narrative for students of East European politics and history and Soviet foreign policy.

The Gypsies (The Peoples of Europe)

Angus M. Fraser

List Price: $61.95 By: Blackwell Pub Amazon Marketplace: 6 new & used starting at $11.03

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Central Europe
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> General
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Since their appearance in the Balkans over nine centuries ago, the Gypsies have doggedly refused to fall in with conventional settled life. When, in the fifteenth century, they knocked at the gates of western Europe in the guise of pilgrims, they aroused intense curiosity as well as suspicion, and theories proliferated about their provenance. They remain a people whose culture and customs are beset with misunderstanding. This book describes their history. The story opens with an investigation into Gypsy origins, using the evidence of language and culture to identify their Indian ancestry. The author then traces the Gypsy migration through the Middle East, Europe and the world. They became renowned for their metal-working, music, fortune-telling, healing and horse-dealing. But right from the start they outraged latent prejudices in the settled populations they moved among. Governments sought to bring them to heel and they were harassed, outlawed, hunted down and banished. In what is now Rumania they were enslaved from the fourteenth century until the mid-nineteenth century; in 1725 the Prussians made the Gypsies into legal vermin and decreed that they could be hanged without trial; in Spain, in 1749 all Gypsies were rounded up, to be set to forced labour; in Switzerland, from 1926 to 1973, a respectable children's charity practised institutionalized abduction. Persecution reached its apogee when the Nazis embarked on outright genocide: in this forgotten holocaust perhaps half a million Gypsies lost their lives. The ethnic tensions in today's Europe mean that the pattern of antagonism continues. And yet this is in many ways a story of achievement. For the Gypsies managed, with no literate tradition, no state and no national identity, to preserve a distinctive heritage over centuries of vicissitude. How and why they did so are the twin themes of this book.

Magic Prague

Angelo Maria Ripellino

List Price: $40.00 By: University of California Press Amazon Marketplace: 17 new & used starting at $10.64

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Central Europe
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Czech Republic
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Germany -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This unusual, distinctive book is a glowing, theatrical blend of history, travelogue, fictional sketch, art and literary criticism, and personal essay. Angelo Ripellino goes beyond the tourist cliché of Prague and brings out the mystery, ambiguity, gloom, lethargy, and hidden fascination of the city of the Vltava. He uses melodrama and ghost stories, as well as tales from the enchanted road and the risqué barroom to relate the sorcery of the Bohemian capital in a wonderful mix of fact and fiction.
As the book opens, Kafka and Hasek are still stalking the streets of the Old Town. In the second section we are in the seventeenth century, with its emphasis on the occult. Traveling on, we move through Prague's bordellos, theaters, ghetto, alchemists' laboratories, and cafés, accompanied by Rudolph II, Apollinaire, and Czech dadaists. The result of this imaginary guided tour is a deeper knowledge of the city than any ordinary guidebook can provide as well as an exhilarating introduction to Czech culture.

One Day That Shook the Communist World: The 1956 Hungarian Uprising and Its Legacy

Paul Lendvai

Amazon Price: $20.40 List Price: $27.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Princeton University Press Amazon Marketplace: 31 new & used starting at $16.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Austria
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Central Europe
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> General AAS

Editorial Review:

On October 23, 1956, a popular uprising against Soviet rule swept through Hungary like a force of nature, only to be mercilessly crushed by Soviet tanks twelve days later. Only now, fifty years after those harrowing events, can the full story be told. This book is a powerful eyewitness account and a gripping history of the uprising in Hungary that heralded the future liberation of Eastern Europe.

Paul Lendvai was a young journalist covering politics in Hungary when the uprising broke out. He knew the government officials and revolutionaries involved. He was on the front lines of the student protests and the bloody street fights and he saw the revolutionary government smashed by the Red Army. In this riveting, deeply personal, and often irreverent book, Lendvai weaves his own experiences with in-depth reportage to unravel the complex chain of events leading up to and including the uprising, its brutal suppression, and its far-reaching political repercussions in Hungary and neighboring Eastern Bloc countries. He draws upon exclusive interviews with Russian and former KGB officials, survivors of the Soviet backlash, and relatives of those executed. He reveals new evidence from closed tribunals and documents kept secret in Soviet and Hungarian archives. Lendvai's breathtaking narrative shows how the uprising, while tragic, delivered a stunning blow to Communism that helped to ultimately bring about its demise.

One Day That Shook the Communist World is the best account of these unprecedented events.