Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe

by Anne Applebaum

Overview

In 1991, Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag, Iron Curtain and Red Famine, took a three-month road trip through the borderlands between the fallen Soviet Union and Europe—lands that became Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and Moldova. In her iconic reportage, which has become indispensable history, she captures the harrowing story of a region that is once again threatened by Russia.









An extraordinary journey into the past and present of the lands east of Poland and west of Russia—an area defined throughout its history by colliding empires. Traveling from the former Soviet naval center of Kaliningrad on the Baltic to the Black Sea port of Odessa, Anne Applebaum encounters a rich range of competing cultures, religions, and national aspirations.
 
In reasserting their heritage, the inhabitants of the borderlands attempt to build a future grounded in their fractured ancestral legacies. In the process, neighbors unearth old conflicts, devote themselves to recovering lost culture, and piece together competing legends to create a new tradition. Rich in surprising encounters and vivid characters, Between East and West brilliantly illuminates the soul of the borderlands and the shaping power of the past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525433187
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/13/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	391,685
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post and the author of several history books, including Gulag, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, and Iron Curtain, which was a National Book Award Finalist. She is a former visiting professor at the London School of Economics, a former member of The Washington Post editorial board, a former deputy editor of The Spectator magazine, and a former Warsaw correspondent of The Economist. Her essays appear in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs.
 
 
www.anneapplebaum.com

Hometown:

Poland

Date of Birth:

July 25, 1964

Place of Birth:

Washington, D.C.

Education:

B.A., Yale University, 1986; M.Sc., London School of Economics, 1987; St. Antony¿s College, Oxford

Website:

http://www.anneapplebaum.com

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Between East and West and Anne Applebaum

“In her relentless quest for understanding, Applebaum shines light into forgotten worlds of human hope, suffering and dignity.” —The Washington Post

“The interleaved surveys of the region’s history [are] sweeping and elegantly-written.” —The Independent (UK)
 
“Applebaum's receptiveness encourages borderlanders to tell her the myriad of ways that political partitioning has subjugated their personal lives, cultural traditions and languages.” —Publishers Weekly 

“Achieves both specificity and readability.” —The New York Times
 
“Ms. Applebaum offers us windows into the lives of the men and sometimes women who constructed the police states of Eastern Europe. She gives us a glimpse of those who resisted. But she also gives us a harrowing portrait of the rest—the majority of Eastern Europe's population, who, having been caught up in the continent's conflicts time and time again, now found themselves pawns in a global one.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Applebaum wants to give flesh to a concept.” —New Yorker 
 
“She is a terrific writer, rare among regional experts. . . . Applebaum possesses an overarching vision of what occurred in Eastern Europe.” —Christian Science Monitor
 
“Her researches have led her radically to reappraise some of the most basic historical assumptions made in the West.” —Evening Standard (UK)
 
“Applebaum [has the] ability to take a dense and complex subject, replete with communist acronyms and impenetrable jargon, and make it not only informative but enjoyable—and even occasionally witty.” —The Telegraph (UK)

From the Publisher

Traveling the uncertain land between Eastern and Western Europe, Applebaum recounts her three-month journey and the people she meets, typified by a man who was born in Poland, raised in the Soviet Union and now living in Belarus-yet he has never left his village. The territorial borders of many towns in Eastern Europe have been redrawn so often over the centuries that such villages are called kresy, meaning they belong to no one in particular. The American-born Applebaum, who is the foreign editor of the London Spectator and has residences in Poland and England, shows herself as a journalist of sturdy competence, smart and shrewd. She speaks Polish and Russian and is well read in Eastern European history. Applebaum travels from kresy to kresy in dilapidated private autos she hires, although on occasion she must walk; the few hotels are seedy and homes where she is sometimes invited to sleep aren't markedly more comfortable. But she's not deterred; Applebaum's receptiveness encourages borderlanders to tell her the myriad of ways that political partitioning has subjugated their personal lives, cultural traditions and languages. She in turn explains to us the nationalism motivating these newly independent people as they try to redefine their true heritages. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The borderlands west of Russia, in east central Europe, have endured frequent changes of hegemony. Citizens of one village may think of themselves as Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, or Moldovan regardless of where the current borders are drawn, as Applebaum discovered during her travels and interviews. An American journalist now living in London, she spent the years 1988-1991 as a free-lancer in Poland and revisited the area from which her great-grandparents had emigrated. The narrative proceeds from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea to Odessa on the Black Sea, stopping in large cities and small towns; it combines a bit of history from the Middle Ages with tales of contemporary life without the Soviet Union to portray an eclectic mixture of ethnic identity. The vivid descriptions of another way of life would enhance popular collections.-Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York

Library Journal