Eastern Books

The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

Diane Ackerman

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Total reviews: 86 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

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the New York Times bestseller: a true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.

When Germany invaded poland, stuka bombers devastated warsaw—and the city's zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jews into empty cages. Another dozen "guests" hid inside the Zabinskis' villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing, and, during rare moments of calm, piano concerts. Jan, active in the polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants—otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes.

with her exuberant prose and exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman engages us viscerally in the lives of the zoo animals, their keepers, and their hidden visitors. She shows us how Antonina refused to give in to the penetrating fear of discovery, keeping alive an atmosphere of play and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her. 8 pages of illustrations.

To See You Again

Betty Schimmel, Joyce Gabriel

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Total reviews: 42 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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"A memoir of the human heart . . . a drama of the highest order as well as an important document of twentieth-century history."--Faye Kellerman

Betty Markowitz and Richie Kovacs fell in love as teenagers in Budapest amid the terror and uncertainty of a world at war. They planned their future together, secure in the belief that their love could survive anything, even Hitler. Then, in March 1944, the Germans invaded Hungary.

Here is the moving and dramatic account of one woman's courage in the face of war, and of a love that spanned three decades. From the agony of separation to the horrors of a concentration camp, from her marriage to Otto Schimmel, an Auschwitz survivor who promised her a new life in America, through the joy and struggle of raising a family, Betty never forgot her first love. Then, in 1975, she returned to Budapest and saw someone across a crowded room . . .

To See You Again is Betty Schimmel's wrenching memoir of survival and sacrifice, of love lost and love found. A true story that unfolds with all the suspense of a novel, it is one that will not soon be forgotten.

Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime SarajevoRevised Edition

Zlata Filipovic

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Total reviews: 78 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Great Book 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Sheesh...this is the product of a child, not the work of a Pulitzer prize winning journalist. It is an excellent diary, an excellent primary source and an excellent text for a better understanding of the Yugoslav wars. Yes...it does only tell one point of view - hers - it is her diary! Some readers are offended because of the comparison to Anne Frank; a comparison that Filipovic and others make in the book. The comparison is totally fair. Both are intelligent children caught up in situations they have no control over during wars of ethnic cleansing and extermination. It is a testament to Zlata that she can make the connection to Anne Frank...obviously the rest of the world couldn't. They (We) abandoned the Jews sixty years ago and abandoned hundreds of thousands of Croats/Bosniaks/Serbs to genocide forty years later. Zlata remembered Anne Frank's words...the world didn't.

Editorial Review:

When Zlata’s Diary was first published at the height of the Bosnian conflict, it became an international bestseller and was compared to The Diary of Anne Frank, both for the freshness of its voice and the grimness of the world it describes. It begins as the day-today record of the life of a typical eleven-year-old girl, preoccupied by piano lessons and birthday parties. But as war engulfs Sarajevo, Zlata Filipovi´c becomes a witness to food shortages and the deaths of friends and learns to wait out bombardments in a neighbor’s cellar. Yet throughout she remains courageous and observant. The result is a book that has the power to move and instruct readers a world away.

The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000

Niall Ferguson

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Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

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Conventional wisdom has long claimed that economic change is the prime mover of political change, whether in the age of industry or Internet. But is it? Ferguson thinks it is high time we re-examined the link-the nexus, in Thomas Carlyle's phrase-between economics and politics. His central argument is that the conflicting impulses of sex, violence, and power are together more powerful than money. Among Ferguson's startling claims are: · Nothing has done more to transform the world economy than war, yet wars themselves do not have primarily economic causes. · The present age of economic globalization is coinciding-paradoxically-with political and military fragmentation. · Financial crises are frequently caused by unforeseen political events rather than economic fluctuations. · The relationship between prosperity and government popularity is largely illusory. · Since political and economic liberalization are not self-perpetuating, the so-called triumph of democracy worldwide may be short-lived. · A bold synthesis of political history and modern economic theory, Cash Nexus will transform the landscape of modern history and draw challenging conclusions about the prospects of both capitalism and democracy.

Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

Robert D. Kaplan

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Total reviews: 121 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Excellent and broad sweeping introduction to the Balkans 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts is more than a travel book for most of his experiences in the Balkan's were far from tourism. Rather, like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, his book explores time and place with the precision of an anthropologist.

Kaplan points out that this area of the world seems to have a talent for starting wars and once was called `ethnic trash' by Karl Marx. Serbia is the area where Habsburg Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated, an event that sparked World War I. From here come the 20th century's first terrorists. Kaplan points out that the Balkans are not just the area where Communism meets capitalism. It is also the place where Roman Catholic meets Eastern Orthodox, where Christian meets Islam, where Rome meets Constantinople, where Habsburg Austria-Hungarian empire meets the Ottoman empire. Kaplan identifies the principal illness of Balkans which he sees as conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that its borders expand to the point at which their empire reached its heights in ancient or medieval times.

Croatia's unique history is explored, its alliance with Hapsburg Austria, and its history of conflict between Catholic and Orthodox Serbs. A fascinating part of the book is the rise of Croatia as a small nation only to become a puppet of the German Nazis. During this time murders against both Orthodox Serbs and Jews occurred. The figure of Catholic Cardinal Stepinac remains controversial to this day, for he appeared to support the fascist nationalists until their murder of Jews and Orthodox Serbs reached terrible proportions. He chastised the fascist around the fall of Nazism in World War II but was later tried as a war criminal by the communist Tito. Tensions remain to this day between Catholic Croatia and the mixed ethnic state of Bosnia where Catholics, Jews, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslims all live in suspicion of each other.

Kaplan repeatedly praises the work of Dame Rebecca West in her Black Lamb Grey Falcon. West indicates that the Turks ruined the Balkans so greatly that it has never been repaired.

Albanians descended from Illyrian tribes and their language bears no similarity to other languages. Kosovo has gone back and forth between Serbian and Albanian control. Enver Hoxha was a young Communist freedom fighter against the Nazis. At the end of World War II, Albania had lost more than 7% of their population.

Macedonia is a mix of ethnic groups. Turks, Albanians, Serbs, Rumanians, Greeks, and Bulgarians live there side by side since the days of St. Paul. Czar Alexander II's war to liberate Bulgaria from Turkey in 1877 was the first spark of modern Great Power conflict. Russians occupied the Bulgarian capital of Sofia and dictated to the defeated Turks the Treaty of San Stefano. The union of Macedonia and Bulgaria created a pro-Russian state. Germany's Bismarck set out to revise the Treaty in the Congress of Berlin. Macedonia was returned to Turkish rule upon pressure by Germany and Great Britain on the Russians. To balance the powers, Turkey got Macedonia, Austria got Bosnia, an arrangement leading to World War I. The Russian forces in Bulgaria drove the Muslims into Macedonia whereas the Austrian advance into Bosnia also drove the Muslims south into Macedonia, where the enraged Turks began terrorizing the Orthodox Christians. The relationship between Bulgaria and Macedonia has been one where Bulgaria wishes to incorporate Macedonia within their borders but has always been on the losing side of world conflicts, never allowing for integration.

Apart from forcing Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid to accept a liberal constitution, the "Young Turks" led by Pasha had no well-defined program. As with Gorbachev, Pasha and the Young Turks were determined to conserve in a loser more liberal form the Empire, which they perceived as threatened primarily by a reactionary Sultanate and near total resistance to change. The Ottoman Empire's disintegration enraged fundamentalists Muslims within Turkey. The increasingly authoritarian Young Turk regime culminated in the 1915 mass murder of 1.5 million Armenians, the century's first holocaust. This genocide was perpetrated because the Armenians demographically threatened the Muslim Turks.

Romania's language is Latinate, closer to ancient Roman. Roman legions conquered this territory in 101 AD. Romanians are closer in appearance to the Latins than to Slavs. In 325 AD Roman Christianity was brought to Romania. However invasion by Bulgarians brought in the Eastern Orthodox religion. Geographically Romania lies vulnerable between the Ukrainians and Russians and Turks. For the 14th century onward the Turks kept Romania in fear. There were uprisings against the Turks, for example Vlad the Impaler (the historical "Dracula") was a rebel against Turkish rule. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Russians invaded over a dozen times. In the 1860's the Romanians elected Karl Hohenzollern as their king. Carol I abdicated to his nephew Ferdinand, who married Princess Marie of Edinburgh, granddaughter to Queen Victoria. Queen Marie was a force behind the throne during World War I and died before her son Carol II caused havoc.

King Carol II is a colorful character, having deserted from the army, eloped with a Romanian aristocrat, then was forced to abdicate since Romanian law requires him to marry a foreigner. He marries Princess Helen of Greece and deserts her for Lupescu, his Jewish mistress. He abdicates a second time rather than return to his wife and leave his mistress. He extorted funds from casinos and deposited $50 million in foreign banks. He declared dictatorship. He supported the Legionnaires of the Archangel Michael until they turned against him because of his Jewish mistress. Hitler also told Carol that he preferred to have Codreanu as dictator of Romania rather than Carol. Carol had Codreanu and the legion leaders killed which angered Hitler. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu formed the Legion around secret nests of 13 men who drank each other's blood and vowing to commit murder if ordered. Carol formed his own Nazi party and repressed his countries 800,000 Jews. Stalin demanded Bessarabia and Hitler demanded Transylvania. Carol tired to play a double game and lost. He left Romania in 1940 in a train full of gold bound for Mexico. His 18 year old son, Michael became king. The Legion struck back, primarily at Romania's Jewish population, killing thousands. Hitler wished to obtain Romania's oil reserves. In 1947 King Michael also abandoned Romania in a train full of treasures as his father had done.

The fall of King Carol II Hohenzollern and the rise of reactionary forces in 1941 in Romania are a frightening tale. The rise of the Legionnaires of the Archangel Michael, a terrorist group that committed murder against the Jews in their country, is a terrible story and helps us realize the degree of anti-Semitism throughout Eastern Europe.

Nicolae Ceausescu ruled Romania for a quarter-century until the army executed him. Ceausescu outlawed abortion and birth control so that the Romanians could outbreed the Hungarians. However poverty and semi-starvation increased infant mortality rates. Badly urbanized peasants worked in factories and lived in dorms where only alcohol and propaganda were readily available. Romania was allowed to fall under Stalin's domain at the peace discussions at Yalta.

In World War II, the Romanians were on the side of the Nazis while the Jews in Romania supported the Russians. The Romanian army killed 4,000 Jews in Jassy and then the army evacuated another 12,000 that dies of thirst and asphyxiation in railroad cars. Then in 1941 and 192 15,000 Jews were deported from Moldavia into Romanian run concentration camps. In 1944 when the Russians invaded Romania, the Romanians switched sides and began fighting the Nazis. The Romanians have always fallen between three empires, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey, and Russia.

The Bulgars were a Tartar tribe. In the medieval period, Bulgaria was among the powerful kingdoms in Europe. Kings carved out empire from Albania to the Black Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains to the Aegean. In 865 Bulgaria became the first of the Slav peoples to embrace Orthodox Christianity. Byzantine Emperor Basil defeated King Samuel and had 14,000 prisoners blinded - the most horrific moment in Bulgarian history. Bulgaria then endured 500 years of Ottoman occupation. Turkish rule was bloodier in Bulgaria than anywhere else. In 1876 Turks encouraged band of Bulgarians converted to Islam to hack to death 5,000 Orthodox Christians. A Russian army swept through Bulgaria in 1877 liberating Bulgaria from Ottoman rule.

Kaplan argues that Greece must be understood through the eyes of the Balkans rather than through a Hollywood lens. He tells of Salonika - Thessaloniki in Greek -a community of Spanish Jews. In 53 AD St. Paul preached from the Synagogue. Jews from Hungary and German arrived in 1373. Following the conquest of Salonika by the Ottoman Turks, 20,000 Spanish Jews received permission to move there in 1492. By 1913 half the population of the city was Jews. The Nazis captured the city in 1941 and in five months had sent almost all the Jews to concentration camps. Of all the cities in Nazi-occupied Europe, Salonika ranked first in the number of Jewish victims: out of a population of 56,000, 54,0505 - 96.5%- were exterminated at Auschwitz.

The Greek Church was the mother of all Eastern Orthodox churches, which are treasure houses of their culture that survived the Ottoman rule. Hagia Sophia built in the sixth century AD by Emperor Justinian became the prototype for all Orthodox cathedrals, for St. Marks in Venice, and for mosques throughout Turkey. Byzantium, an empire created in AD 324, as the successor of Rome, and destroyed 1,100 years later by Ottoman Turks in 1453. During these eleven centuries, the Byzantine Empire was a Greek empire. Ottoman Turks ejected the Byzantine Greeks from Constantinople in the fifteenth century but large Greek communities survived in Istanbul and along the western shore of Asia Minor - particularly Smyrna. In 1921 the Greek army advanced into Asia Minor beyond the Greek occupied coastal areas. In 1922 Kemal Ataturk, in the midst of developing a new Turkish republic, drove the Greek army back. Greek dead numbered 30,000. Then 400,000 Turks from Greek Thrace moved into Turkey and 1,250,000 Greeks from Asia Minor went into exile in Greece, increasing the population by 20%. Refuges tripled the size of Athens. The Nazi invasion left 8% of the population dead, followed by the Greek Civil War which saw more destruction than the war against the Nazis.

Constantinople is a Greek word for a historically Greek city. The Cyrillic alphabet, used in Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, and Russia, emerged from the Greek alphabet when two monks, Cyril and Methodius, left Salonika in the ninth century AD to proselytize among the Slavs. The ultimate achievement of Periclean Athens was to breathe humanism - compassion for the individual - into the inhumanity of the East. Classical Greece of the First Millennium BC invented the West by humanizing the East.
This well written book taught me much about the Balkans and gave me an appreciation for these boiling nationalistic forces that run against each other century after century.

Editorial Review:

From the assassination that set off World War I to the ethnic warfare sweeping Bosnia and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the 20th century--the place where terrorism and genocide were first practiced as tools of policy. This enthralling political travelogue helps us understand that region's anguish. 16 pages of photos.

Imperium

Ryszard Kapuscinski

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Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

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The Polish journalist whose The Soccer War and The Emperor are counted as classics of contemporary reportage now bears witness in Imperium to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This magisterial book combines childhood memory with unblinking journalism, a radar for the truth with a keen appreciation of the absurd.

Imperium begins with Ryszard Kapuscinski's account of the Soviet occupation of his town in eastern Poland in 1939. It culminates fifty years later, with a forty-thousand-mile journey that takes him from the haunted corridors of the Kremlin to the abandoned gulag of Kolyma, from a miners' strike in the arctic circle to a panic-stricken bus ride through the war-torn Caucasus.

Out of passivity and paranoia, ethnic hatred and religious fanaticism that have riven two generations of Eastern Europeans, Kapuscinski has composed a symphony for a collapsing empire—a work that translates history into the hopes and sufferings of the human beings condemned to live it.

Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

Orlando Figes

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Total reviews: 42 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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History on a grand scale-an enchanting masterpiece that explores the making of one of the world's most vibrant civilizations

A People's Tragedy, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, did "more to help us understand the Russian Revolution than any other book I know." Now, in Natasha's Dance, internationally renowned historian Orlando Figes does the same for Russian culture, summoning the myriad elements that formed a nation and held it together.

Beginning in the eighteenth century with the building of St. Petersburg-a "window on the West"-and culminating with the challenges posed to Russian identity by the Soviet regime, Figes examines how writers, artists, and musicians grappled with the idea of Russia itself-its character, spiritual essence, and destiny. He skillfully interweaves the great works-by Dostoevsky, Stravinsky, and Chagall-with folk embroidery, peasant songs, religious icons, and all the customs of daily life, from food and drink to bathing habits to beliefs about the spirit world. Figes's characters range high and low: the revered Tolstoy, who left his deathbed to search for the Kingdom of God, as well as the serf girl Praskovya, who became Russian opera's first superstar and shocked society by becoming her owner's wife.

Like the European-schooled countess Natasha performing an impromptu folk dance in Tolstoy's War and Peace, the spirit of "Russianness" is revealed by Figes as rich and uplifting, complex and contradictory-a powerful force that unified a vast country and proved more lasting than any Russian ruler or state.

The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World

Kati Marton

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Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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In this ground-breaking book, acclaimed author Kati Marton brings to life an unknown chapter of World War II: the tale of nine men who grew up in Budapest's brief Golden Age, then, driven from Hungary by anti-Semitism, fled to the West, especially to the United States, and changed the world. These nine men, each celebrated for individual achievements, were actually part of a unique group who grew up in a time and place that will never come again. It is Marton's extraordinary achievement to trace what for a few dazzling years was common to all of them -- the magic air of Budapest -- and show how their separate lives and careers were, in fact, all shaped by Budapest's lively café life before the darkness closed in.

Marton follows the astonishing lives of four history-changing scientists, all just one step ahead of Hitler's terror state, who helped usher in the nuclear age and the computer (Edward Teller, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner); two major movie myth-makers (Michael Curtiz, who directed Casablanca, and Alexander Korda, who produced The Third Man); two immortal photographers (Robert Capa and Andre Kertesz); and one seminal writer (Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon).

Marton follows these brilliant products of Budapest's Golden Age as they flee fascism in the 1920s and 1930s en route to sanctuary -- and immortality. As the scientists labor in the secret city of Los Alamos in the race to build the atom bomb, Koestler, once a communist agent imprisoned by Franco, writes the most important anticommunist novel of the century. Capa, the first photographer to go ashore on D-Day, later romances Ingrid Bergman and is acknowledged as the world's greatest war photographer before his tragic death in Vietnam. Curtiz not only gives us Casablanca, consistently voted the greatest romantic movie ever made, but also discovers Doris Day and directs James Cagney in the quintessential patriotic film, Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Ultimately, The Great Escape is an American story and an important, previously untold chapter of the tumultuous last century. Yet it is also a poignant story -- in the words of the great historian Fritz Stern, "an evocation of genius in exile . . . an instructive, moving delight." An epilogue relates the journey into exile of three members of the next generation of Budapest exiles: financier-philanthropist George Soros, Intel founder Andy Grove, and 2002 Nobel laureate in literature Imre Kertesz.

Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey

Isabel Fonseca

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Total reviews: 53 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Gypsy Road 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Isabel Fonseca has written a cleared-eyed, well documented account of gyspies, focusing on those she visited in Eastern Europe. It is a higly readable, provocative narrative about a population ignored and abused, but with a defined culture that continues to survive at the edge of the modern world.

Bury Me Standing Review 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I am gypsy. I have been severed from my heritage. This book gave me the reason behind my rhymes. The rituals of everyday life explained in this book are exactly the same as my own rituals, though I didn't know why I did them. I now know why, it's because I am gypsy and these are the gypsy ways.

Bravo! 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This book came highly recommended to me. Any book that aims at humanizing and demystifying the Roma people is a step in the right direction. I am a "white" American woman who has lived among the poorest of Gypsy people in the mountains of Romania. I can tell you from experience, these are a strong people, who have endured (and continue to endure) unimaginable hardships and prejudices. Many are unfairly shunned by society and go unrecognized by local governments. They are shoved to the side and forgotten. This book, "Bury Me Standing" is one of those books that everyone should read. You will be amazed at what you didn't know. You will be angry/sad/speechless as a result of what you find out. Read this book and then share it with others. It's a history that needs to be heard.

Editorial Review:

Isabel Fonseca describes the four years she spent with Gypsies from Albania to Poland, listening to their stories, deciphering their taboos, and befriending their matriarchs, activists, and child prostitutes. A masterful work of personal reportage, this volume is also a vibrant portrait of a mysterious people and an essential document of a disappearing culture. 50 photos.

Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds

Stephen Kinzer

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If Turkey lived up to its potential, it could rule the world - but will it? A passionate report from the front lines

For centuries few terrors were more vivid in the West than fear of "the Turk," and many people still think of Turkey as repressive, wild, and dangerous. Crescent and Star is Stephen Kinzer's compelling report on the truth about this nation of contradictions - poised between Euroep and Asia, caught between the glories of its Ottoman past and its hopes for a democratic future, between the dominance of its army and the needs of its civilian citizens, between its secular expectations and its Muslim traditions.

Kinzer vividly describes Turkey's captivating delights as he smokes a water pipe, searches for the ruins of lost civilizations, watches a camel fight, and discovers its greatest poet. But he is also attund to the political landscape, taking us from Istanbul's elegant cafes to wild mountain outposts on Turkey's eastern borders, while along the way he talks to dissidents and patriots, villagers and cabinet ministers. He reports on political trials and on his own arrest by Turkish soldiers when he was trying to uncover secrets about the army's campaigns against Kurdish guerillas. He explores the nation's hope to join the European Union, the human-rights abuses that have kept it out, and its difficult relations with Kurds, Armenians, and Greeks.

Will this vibrant country, he asks, succeed in becoming a great democratic state? He makes it clear why Turkey is poised to become "the most audacious nation of the twenty-first century."