“The seven essays here are expansive, wide-ranging, almost impossible to categorize, merging criticism and personal experience, scholarship and life. Although bounded by the author’s devotion to Russian literature, The Possessed is really a kind of autobiography in reading, in which the characters are Tolstoy, Isaac Babel and Pushkin.”—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"[Travels in Siberia is] an uproarious, sometimes dark yarn filled with dubious meals, broken-down vehicles, abandoned slave-labor camps and ubiquitous statues of Lenin—On the Road meets The Gulag Archipelago . . . As he demonstrated in Great Plains, Frazier is the most amiable of obsessives . . . he peels away Russia's stolid veneer to reveal the quirkiness and humanity beneath . . . Frazier has the gumption and sense of wonder shared by every great travel writer, from Bruce Chatwin to Redmond O'Hanlon, as well as the ability to make us see how the most trivial or ephemeral detail is part of the essential texture of a place . . . [An] endlessly fascinating tale."—Joshua Hammer, The New York Times Book Review

“Gordin zeros in on the crucial years from Hiroshima to the first flash of ‘Joe 1’ in 1949, the first Russian bomb and the ninth nuclear explosion. Using a spectacular variety of sources from Soviet and American sources, Gordin gives us a book that must be read to understand how we came to the sprawling nuclear proliferation in which we now live.”—Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University

“Clear and beautifully lyrical . . . Of all the books that mark this anniversary, [There Is No Freedom Without Bread] is one that must be read. Pleshakov writes history with a human face.”—Gerard DeGroot, The Washington Post

"Alexievich has not merely given us a work of documentation but of excavation, of revealed meaning. It is hard to imagine how anyone in the West will read these cantos of loss and not feel a sense of communion, of a shared humanity in the face of this horror . . . The stories collected here are not only haunting but illuminating."—Andrew Meier, The Nation

Ian Armour's authoritative history of Eastern Europe spans the turbulent years from 1740 to 1918. It traces how the big powers, most notably the Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian Empires, jostled for control in the region and examines the roots of nationalism which were nurtured by harrowing poverty and social turmoil.

This insightful study explores the proposition that the idea of European unity makes sense when there is more that unites Europe than divides it, and then asks when that has been true during the past hundred years and provides the historical context necessary to fully understand the complexity surrounding the European Union.

“Ms. Chamberlain, a British historian and the author of Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia, brings these forgotten figures back to life with great skill and sympathy, reconstructing their intellectual milieu and making a strong case for the importance of their banishment as a turning point in the road from revolution to Communist tyranny.”—William Grimes, The New York Times

This pioneering new history draws heavily on the testimonies of those who suffered in Hitler's ghettos, making use of a wide range of diaries and memoirs (and exploring the problems inherent in such sources). Other documentary sources—particularly German—are also used, but the intention is to look at the ghettos "from below," focusing on behavior, values, and suffering, as well as on the heroism and the passiveness of the Jewish communities. Never before has personal testimony been so extensively used and systematically evaluated to write a history of the East European ghettos.

Between 1989 and 1991 the world witnessed a series of dramatic changes: the end of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, the end of the superpower nuclear arms race, the demise of East-West rivalries in the Third World, and, finally, the break-up of the Soviet Union, all of which effectively ended the Cold War. End of the Cold War Era investigates the many unanswered questions posed by sudden end of the Cold War and extracts essential lessons from our recent past in three major areas: Europe, superpower relations, and the Third World.

Located at the heart of Europe between east and west, Czechoslovakia was, in many ways, the epicenter of twentieth-century European history. L Maria Dowling's history of Czechoslovakia features themes of government: nationalism, democracy, and authoritarian rule and guides the reader through the particularly rich and varied experiences of Czechoslovakian power and culture in twentieth-century Europe including the burst of popular democracy during the "Prague Spring of 1968".