Here is an illustrated, fast-moving guided tour through several thousand years of Eastern European history. Most people can't keep up with the dizzying speed of events in the former Yugoslavia, the former Czechoslovakia, and the former Soviet Union.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Avoidable,
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This review is from: The History of Eastern Europe for Beginners (Writers and Readers) (Paperback)
Aside from the pro-Socialist slant already mentioned by several reviewers, it is a book riddled with factual errors (the Letts and Moldavians are Slavs? Tito was a Serb? Why does the map outline of 1795 Partitioned Poland-Lithuania only show half of the country?) and fails in its basic premise of providing an outline of Eastern European history. Regardless of one's politics, their approach is ahistorical, with odd strings of facts displayed without context or explanation, rather like a book of trivia. Other books from this "...for Beginners" series have been far better organized and done a much better job of explaining their subject than this book does. Its half-baked organization, poorly-disguised ideological partisanship and quite stark plethora of factual innaccuracies and errors is all better understood when one looks at the bibliography: a book on flags, a U.S. government collection of global statistics and a couple other similar "references" that would get a standard high school research paper returned for lack of effort. These guys obviously didn't do much research.
It's sad because this field desperately needs a good introductory guide for laymen, but this book isn't it. This is a case where something is not better than nothing.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great, quick read!,
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This review is from: The History of Eastern Europe for Beginners (Writers and Readers) (Paperback)
This is a great quick read that covers a lot of detail and history in a humorous and easy way. It's a good beginning point to learn the complex history of Eastern Europe.
8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
If you liked Stalin, you'll LOVE "History of Eastern Europe",
By
This review is from: The History of Eastern Europe for Beginners (Writers and Readers) (Paperback)
While the book was helpful in learning basic geography of eastern Europe and had many humorous comments, I had a hard time getting past the blatant sympathy for communism. The section on the Soviet Union, for example, described the "widespread discontent" brought about by Stalin's collectivization of agriculture. A cartoon showed a sad farmer wearing a barrel with little straps. There was no mention of the tens of millions who died as a result of the intentional destruction of their seed grain, nor any mention of the purges or slave labor camps. The authors implied that while communism was "unpopular", capitalism produces "unemployment, homelessness and destitution". America was described as an empire exactly analagous to the Soviet Union and it's puppet states. The authors did concede that Joe Stalin had corrupted the idealistic dream of Marx and Lenin.
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