Ukraine
In Spring 2022 this subject of a page needs no rationale, no explanation. Events in Ukraine are happening so fast that the daily crisis overwhelms thoughts and questions about the people, their history, their literature, their foodways, all the warm and living intricacies of what has made them “Ukrainian” and what sustains them today. More will be added in the coming days, weeks, months, and now perhaps years.
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956
National Book Award Finalist
TIME Magazine’s #1 Nonfiction Book of 2012
A New York Times Notable Book
A Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2012
Best Nonfiction of 2012: The Wall Street Journal, The Plain Dealer
In the much-anticipated follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. Iron Curtain describes how, spurred by Stalin and his secret police, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. Drawing on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time, Applebaum portrays in chilling detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. As a result the Soviet Bloc became a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in these electrifying pages.