| name | value |
| authors | Jacob Mikanowski |
| isbn | 978-1524748500 |
| pages | 400 |
| rating | ★ ★ ★ ★ |
| date started | 2024-05-10 |
| date finished | 2024-05-16 |
| locations | Sarajevo |
Good book on the history of Eastern Europe. Enjoyed it, but some things that I didn't like:
- too much focus on magic. It felt like Eastern Europe was the land from Magical Realism novels or the place from Kusturica films. The place where people believed in the power of saints, magic and weird things and not in science, logic, commerce and any other attributes of modern world.
- I like the stories author add in. I didn't like many stories that were left: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostarbeiter, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executed_Renaissance and so on.
- Some of "struggles" felt too dramatic in the book, especially comparing to the issues in the neighboring countries just decade before or after.
- Also didn't enjoy how author randomly chose spelling for Ukrainian cities: Lviv, Kharkiv had proper Ukrainian spelling, Kyiv and Odesa had a russian one and Ternopil had Polish one. Details matter. Especially in the book about history.
In general the book is good. It can be better. But what I realized that it's almost impossible to had amazing book on history.