Book #5: In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond by Robert D. Kaplan

Pages: 336

Published: 2016

From the Wall Street Journal: “Kaplan is one of America’s [most prominent] writers on the [subject]. . . . In a series of deep [analyses of] the region’s past—Byzantine, Ottoman, Habsburg and Soviet—he finds parallels and echoes that help us understand the present.”

From Patrick M: "Kaplan's memory-logue about Romania, the Cold War, the history of totalitarianism, is worth reading for the way he remembers and examines the grey, monolithic, yet [intimidating] world of Eastern European communism. He does touch on many writers, may views, and this can be name-dropping, as [other critics] noted, but I think of this rather as a struggle to [establish] an intellectual frame for his memories."

I find this book fascinating because it gives an account of how one country changes over time. Though physical locations are static, this book appears to demonstrate how the political structure of one area can shift over a number of decades.