Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

Drawing on half a century of firsthand experience and exemplary scholarship, Timothy Garton Ash tells the story of postwar Europe's triumphs and tragedies

 

Timothy Garton Ash, Europe's "historian of the present," has been "breathing Europe" for the last half century. In Homelands he embarks on a journey around the postwar continent drawing on his own notes from many great events, giving vivid firsthand accounts of its leading actors, revisiting the places where its history was made, and recalling its triumphs and tragedies through their imprint on the present.

 

Garton Ash offers an account of events as seen from the ground--history illustrated by memoir. He describes how Europe emerged from wartime devastation to rebuild, liberate, and unite. And then faltered. It is a singular history of a period of unprecedented progress along with a clear-eyed account of how so much went wrong, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. A tour d'horizon as well as a tour de force, this is an elegy for the dream of a united Europe.