History of the Present: Essays, Sketches And Despatches from Europe in the 1990S - Softcover

Garton Ash, Timothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140283188 ISBN 13: 9780140283181

Publisher: Penguin, 2000

Synopsis

Timothy Garton Ash chronicles this best and worst decades, the 1990s, in a glittering kaleidoscope of essays, sketches and despatches written as history was being made. He joins the East Germans in 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 walks in mass demonstrations in Belgrade and travels through the killing fields of Kosovo. he coolly uncovers the motives for monetaryunion in Paris and Bonn.

About this title

Review:

In the 1980s, Timothy Garton Ash was a respected Central Europe reporter, his books The Uses of Adversity, We the People and The Polish Revolution required reading on the area, but still very much a specialised field. Over the last decade, Europe's supposed margins have forced their way centre 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 now fill our front pages, 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--at once journalistically contemporary, and yet with a real sense of historical perspective usually only found 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 Some of the pieces are now "outdated" in a narrow news sense, but all the more valuable for that--history-with-hindsight will inevitably iron out all the telling creases that Garton Ash records.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

Review:

" This is a kind of writing-- it could be called the history of the present-- for which it is not easy to find examples in earlier literature. . . . Garton Ash is, in the most literal sense of the term,
a contemporary historian. He writes primarily as a witness to the events he is treating, and not just as an outside witness but often as an inside one as well; for his own involvement in these events, emotional and intellectual, is of such intensity that he can speak, in a sense, from the inside as well as the outside.
Yet the sense of the historic dimension of the events in question is never lost. And the quality of the writing places it clearly in the category of good literature."
-- George F. Kennan, on The Uses of Adversity
"This is a kind of writing--it could be called the history of the present--for which it is not easy to find examples in earlier literature. . . . Garton Ash is, in the most literal sense of the term,
a contemporary historian. He writes primarily as a witness to the events he is treating, and not just as an outside witness but often as an inside one as well; for his own involvement in these events, emotional and intellectual, is of such intensity that he can speak, in a sense, from the inside as well as the outside.
Yet the sense of the historic dimension of the events in question is never lost. And the quality of the writing places it clearly in the category of good literature."
--George F. Kennan, on The Uses of Adversity

"From the Hardcover edition."

"This is a kind of writing it could be called the history of the present for which it is not easy to find examples in earlier literature. . . . Garton Ash is, in the most literal sense of the term,
a contemporary historian. He writes primarily as a witness to the events he is treating, and not just as an outside witness but often as an inside one as well; for his own involvement in these events, emotional and intellectual, is of such intensity that he can speak, in a sense, from the inside as well as the outside.
Yet the sense of the historic dimension of the events in question is never lost. And the quality of the writing places it clearly in the category of good literature."
George F. Kennan, on The Uses of Adversity

From the Hardcover edition."

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0140283188
• ISBN 13: 9780140283181
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528