In Europe is not so much a work of history, nor is it strictly a travelogue of the present it is part of a growing genre that is sometimes referred to as the 'history of the present', but might just as well be the 'presence of the past'. The pace rarely slackens and every page sparkles with insight * Herald * It's impossible not to get drawn into this book - Noel Malcolm * Sunday Telegraph * Mr Mak tells this part of the story vividly and in great, gory detail, moving from grim fields of battle (Verdun, Stalingrad) to places of revolution (Petrograd, Berlin), and on to ghastly charnel-houses of death and destruction (Auschwitz, Dresden) * Economist *Īn ingenious geographical-chronological structure. As befits a journalist with an eye for bad news, he also has much more to say on its calamitous first half than on its more successful second half. I thoroughly recommend his book - Allan Massie * Literary Review *Ī broader travelling history of the whole of Europe's 20th century. This is a splendidly panoramic picture of our common European home, a book to read through and then to dip into frequently.

Publisher: Vintage Publishing ISBN: 9780099516736 Number of pages: 896 Weight: 607 g Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 37 mm MEDIA REVIEWSįascinating, informative, sometimes exhilarating, often painful, and quite impossible to summarise.

In Europe is a masterpiece it reads like the epic novel of the continent's most extraordinary century. His unique approach makes the reader an eyewitness to his own half-forgotten past, full of unknown peculiarities, sudden insights and touching encounters. Mak combines the larger story of twentieth-century Europe with details that suddenly give it a face, a taste and a smell. And in an abandoned creche 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. 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. At Ypres he hears the blast of munitions from the Great War that are still detonated twice a day. He describes what he sees at places that have become Europe's well-springs of memory, where history is written into the landscape.

The result is mesmerising: 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 Adriana Warno in Poland, with her holiday job at the gates of the camp at Birkenau.īut Mak is above all an observer. He set off in search of evidence and witnesses, looking to define the condition of Europe at the verge of a new millennium. Geert Mak spent the year 1999 criss-crossing the continent, tracing the history of Europe from Verdun to Berlin, St Petersburg to Auschwitz, Kiev to Srebrenica.

In Europe by Geert Mak