History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (Paperback)

~ (Author) "THUS BERTOLT BRECHT-BUT ONLY PRIVATELY-AFTER THE EAST German workers' rising in the summer of 1953..." (more)
Key Phrases: postcommunist states, eastward enlargement, postcommunist countries, Soviet Union, United States, East Germany (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the 1980s, Timothy Garton Ash was a respected Central Europe reporter, his books The Magic Lantern, The Uses of Adversity, and The Polish Revolution required reading on the area, still very much a specialized field. In the 1990s, Europe's supposed margins forced their way center stage, and everyone wants to know--needs to know--about Lech Walesa's fall from power in Poland, why Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia crumbled into pieces, about Bosnia and Kosovo, where Russia is going. These are the stories that fill our front pages at the turn of the millennium, and dominate discussions in Brussels and beyond.

History of the Present is a series of 29 essays, sketches, and dispatches filed during the 1990s, its title coined by George Kennan in an attempt to capture the uniqueness of Garton Ash's work--journalistically contemporary and yet with a sense of historical perspective usually found only with that handily sure-footed guide, hindsight. Some of the pieces are now "outdated" in a narrow news sense, but all the more valuable for that--history-with-hindsight will inevitably iron out all the telling creases that Garton Ash records. What he produces is, in his own word, a "kaleidoscope" that eludes crass summary, but even so, he concludes with some wise words on what Europe might now mean at the end of the decade. We should all read this book. --Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Garton Ash (The File: A Personal History), a journalist and professor of history at Oxford University, is one of the most acute commentators on contemporary European politics. Well known for previous books about Central and southeastern Europe, he returns now with a collection of essays (previously published in the New York Review of Books and similar venues) about events of the past decade. Present for much of the tumult of those years, he writes about the fall of the Berlin Wall, the blood-soaked ground of Kosovo, the Serbs of Belgrade, Vaclav Havel and Erich Honecker (in prison but still defiant)Damong other matters. Interested in writing what George Kennan called a "history of the present," he offers accounts of history unfolding before his eyes marked by the detached precision of a trained historian. But he also writes with considerable verve and wit: "Penser l'Europe is a French book title, inconceivable as a British one. Thinking Europe is an un-British activity," he muses in one essay. "Those who do it, even as consenting adults in private, risk being stigmatized as 'Euro-intellectuals'Da neologism that neatly combines two things the British deeply distrust." As just that kind of intellectual, he cuts through the bewilderingly complex thickets of history and politics to compose a coherent picture of the upheaval of our times. (He includes a set of annotated chronologies to guide us through the last decade.) Reading these fine essays, one is astonished at the richness and danger of our timesDand grateful that Garton Ash is on hand to decipher the outlines of the newly emerging European order. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (September 11, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375727620
• ISBN-13: 978-0375727627
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #94,329 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A survey of a critical decade, November 9, 2000

By	Toby Joyce (Blanchardstown, Dublin Ireland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (Hardcover)

I seized upon this book with eager expectation, as I had thoroughly enjoyed the author's essays in New York Review of Books. I was not disappointed as Garton Ash manages to maintain an overview and grasp of the whole, though some of the essays are short and almost ephemeral. His major point I agree with: Europe made a serious error in the early 90's by turning its back on the new democracies to the East, and going after greater integration of the West. The cost was disastrous in the Balkans - a war which might have been averted. Worse, European foreign policy was shown to be a complete sham, as the US (again) had to lead the countries of Europe to end genocide and terror within its confines. The book focusses on Poland, (former) East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, with forays into the Balkans (mainly former Yugoslavia. There is even a mid-90s meeting with the current President Kostunica of Serbia, when he was leading a small dissident party in protest against Milosovic. The author chronicles the end of Central Europe and the shift of 'the West' to the borders of Belorus and the Ukraine. The ending note is optimistic that Europe can overcome centuries of internecine warfare, and become peaceful and forward-looking. The irony that former communists now democratically lead most of the nations they once oppressed is not lost - 'creative amnesia' is celebrated in these pages. He disagrees with Huntington's clash of civilizations idea (that future conflict will be based on old religious modes of culture) by pointing out how Ruthenians (for example) straddle the Huntington divide. Highly recommended.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For Europhiles, October 27, 2000

By	"europhile" (Ottawa, ON Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (Hardcover)

This is a wonderful book of sketches written "on the ground" in Europe in the 1990s. The author is a well-known journalist/intellectual who introduced the West to the Solidarity movement in Poland, and wrote the classic first-hand account of the Revolutions of 1989. This latest release is an engrossing collection of short academic-type essays and societal observations mainly of Central and Eastern Europe. Ash is a master of suscinct, on-the-mark and poignant observations. He draws his readers in and forces them to question the West's attitude toward the postcommunist states, and realize the truth of life in those countries. For anyone interested in this region, or the eastern expansion of the EU and of the idea of "Europe".

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Largely informative, December 27, 2001

By	Edward Bosnar (Zagreb, Croatia) - See all my reviews

Despite its rather pretentious title, this is a very informative collection of essays on Central and Eastern Europe during the 1990s. Garton Ash has a particularly intimate knowledge of Germany, Poland and the Czech lands, both past and present. His training as a historian and his practical journalistic work in the region make him eminently qualified to write a `history' of the region's recent past. The only flaws in this book are the several chapters that deal with the former Yugoslavia, as this is an area about which the author knows less (he doesn't speak any of the local languages) and his work suffers for it. The main problem is that he only began visiting the former Yugoslav lands after 1995, and depends on secondary and second-hand sources for his knowledge of wartime events from 1990 to 1995. Thus, he lacks the first-hand experience of the local circumstances that make his observations of Germany, Poland or the former Czechoslovakia so acute. (To his credit, and in contrast to most foreign correspondents, Garton Ash does quite candidly admit that he was playing the war tourist in his trips to Bosnia.) Nevertheless, these shortcomings are compensated by other parts of the book; particularly interesting is the chapter on the Ruthenians - that typical Eastern European stateless nation. Garton Ash is also at his best when discussing the future prospects of a united Europe and the role of Germany in this new continental political order.