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lightreadsPostwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
3/5. Hello. I went back to work, can you tell? I was also reading this absolute brick of a book.
This is what it says on the tin, a sprawling, high-level view of Europe from 1945 to 2005. This book describes briskly but with precision a lot of things – the rise and fall of communism, the Baltic wars – that are by themselves many books. And this narrative is explicitly framed, at the start and at the end, by the holocaust, and its shadow stretches from one end of these 60 years to the other in ways I had not previously understood.
So it's a good book, but it also. Hm. I lack the technical terms for what I mean here, but this book's historiography is very interested in what prominent public intellectuals had to say about things. And it's noticeably less interested (not uninterested, mind you) in what the people to whom many of these things were happening had to say. There is some overlap in these groups, obviously, but still. This is an orientation that becomes really really noticeable over 800 something pages, and it's not really the mode I'd like to consume in.
3/5. Hello. I went back to work, can you tell? I was also reading this absolute brick of a book.
This is what it says on the tin, a sprawling, high-level view of Europe from 1945 to 2005. This book describes briskly but with precision a lot of things – the rise and fall of communism, the Baltic wars – that are by themselves many books. And this narrative is explicitly framed, at the start and at the end, by the holocaust, and its shadow stretches from one end of these 60 years to the other in ways I had not previously understood.
So it's a good book, but it also. Hm. I lack the technical terms for what I mean here, but this book's historiography is very interested in what prominent public intellectuals had to say about things. And it's noticeably less interested (not uninterested, mind you) in what the people to whom many of these things were happening had to say. There is some overlap in these groups, obviously, but still. This is an orientation that becomes really really noticeable over 800 something pages, and it's not really the mode I'd like to consume in.