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A carregar... History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (1999)por Timothy Garton Ash
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Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se irá gostar deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. I've been sipping on this all summer. I had small children for the duration of that decade so I missed a lot of the details at the time. These essays were one way to put them in order. Timothy Garton Ash has an eye for the telling detail and an ear for writing it down. He is never dull or maudlin. He also talks to everybody so you get many different sides of every situation. He puts the map of europe that was drawn by the 90's at the end of the book which I thought was a nice touch. Oh--I almost forgot. I also learned a new word. Fissiparous. sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
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The 1990s. An extraordinary decade in Europe. At its beginning, the old order collapsed along with the Berlin Wall. Everything seemed possible. Everyone hailed a brave new Europe. But no one knew what this new Europe would look like. Now we know. Most of Western Europe has launched into the unprecedented gamble of monetary union, though Britain stands aside. Germany, peacefully united, with its capital in Berlin, is again the most powerful country in Europe. The Central Europeans--Poles, Czechs, Hungarians--have made successful transitions from communism to capitalism and have joined NATO. But farther east and south, in the territories of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, the continent has descended into a bloody swamp of poverty, corruption, criminality, war, and bestial atrocities such as we never thought would be seen again in Europe. Timothy Garton Ash chronicles this formative decade through a glittering collection of essays, sketches, and dispatches written as history was being made. He joins the East Germans for their decisive vote for unification and visits their former leader in prison. He accompanies the Poles on their roller-coaster ride from dictatorship to democracy. He uncovers the motives for monetary union in Paris and Bonn. He walks in mass demonstrations in Belgrade and travels through the killing fields of Kosovo. Occasionally, he even becomes an actor in a drama he describes: debating Germany with Margaret Thatcher or the role of the intellectual with Václav Havel in Prague. Ranging from Vienna to Saint Petersburg, from Britain to Ruthenia, Garton Ash reflects on how "the single great conflict" of the cold war has been replaced by many smaller ones. And he asks what part the United States still has to play. Sometimes he takes an eagle's-eye view, considering the present attempt to unite Europe against the background of a thousand years of such efforts. But often he swoops to seize one telling human story: that of a wiry old farmer in Croatia, a newspaper editor in Warsaw, or a bitter, beautiful survivor from Sarajevo. His eye is sharp and ironic but always compassionate. History of the Present continues the work that Garton Ash began with his trilogy of books about Central Europe in the 1980s, combining the crafts of journalism and history. In his Introduction, he argues that we should not wait until the archives are opened before starting to write the history of our own times. Then he shows how it can be done. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — A carregar... GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)940.559History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- 1945-1999Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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I read this book in 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine was still ongoing. There were certainly hints in the 1990s that this would be a problem. Here's an extract from the 1999 timeline in the book (though the main focus was not Russia):
"9 August. President Yeltsin nominates long-time KGB officer Vladimir Putin as Russian prime minister, the fourth in twelve months.
September. Bomb explosions in Moscow are blamed on Chechen terrorists.
23 September. Russian forces begin a major air offensive against Chechnya.
30 September. Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin says Russian ground forces are moving in and out of Chechnya, which he claims as part of Russia
31 December. Russian president Boris Yeltsin announces his early retirement, due to age and ill health, and names prime minister Vladimir Putin as acting president and his chosen successor."
So even in the 1990s Putin had form for claiming parts of the former Soviet Union as Russian and invading them. ( )