Eastern Europe

The author, a physician in private practice in Illinois, was born in Pécs, Hungary. He has a first-hand knowledge of the plight of Hungarian refugees in the spring of 1945. Their choice was clear: Soviet occupation and years of oppression or freedom in the West. 1945 is the story of this mass exodus of Hungarians to the West, narrated by following the journey of Dr. János Nándor. Every event in the book is true. The time sequences and the connections of actions and spces to the characters was been altered to present a more cohesive and comprehensive story.

Imagine you are nine years old. Your best friend’s father is arrested, half your classmates disappear from school, and someone burns down the house across the road. Imagine you have to cross a snow-covered mountain range at night in order to escape the soldiers who are trying to kill you. How would you deal with these memories once you are an adult? Jones, a relief worker and child psychiatrist, interviewed over 40 Serb and Muslim children who came of age during the Bosnian War and now returns, 20 years after the war began, to discover the adults they have become.

"Anna's Dance: A Balkan Odyssey is an ambitious undertaking. Rich with drama and passion, it's a poignant story of love and misadventure..." -The Manhattan Review Anna Rossi, the protagonist of the coming-of-age novel, Anna's Dance: A Balkan Odyssey, is a twenty-three-year-old mostly Jewish-American girl alienated from her roots and fearful of intimacy. On an impromptu journey through the Balkans, an area whose history and culture attracts her as a kind of mirror of her own, she meets others who share with her a past of external prejudice and internal suffering. Forced to confront directly ...

In this book: “Michael the Brave, the Ottoman Wars, and Count Dracula”— In this overview of the Ottoman Wars in Romania and the career of Wallachian prince Michael the Brave (1558-1601), it is argued that Michael the Brave, and not his earlier relative Vlad Țepeș, was the true lifetime alter ego of Bram Stoker's Count Dracula. “In Search of A.C. Cuza”— A biographical essay about a Romanian law professor and politician, dealing with his intellectual antecedents and his influence on his younger protégé, Romanian militia leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. "Moldavian Ukraine" — A...

Branding on the Eastern Front is both a testimony of how Western-born approaches must adapt to emerging economies, and a crash course in branding for entrepreneurs, marketers, and contemporary consumers of any kind. The late great branding master Wally Olins said in the Foreword to the book “What is fascinating about the work that my very good friend Aneta Bogdan has been doing for the last dozen years or so is that it seeks not only to create brands in a country in which they had no existence at all for fifty or more years, but that she has done it with such verve, intelligence and ...

To many in the West, Orthodoxy remains shrouded in mystery, an exotic and foreign religion that survived in the East following the Great Schism of 1054 that split the Christian world into two camps - Catholic and Orthodox. However, as the second largest Christian denomination, Orthodox Christianity is anything but foreign to the nearly 300 million worshipers who practice it. For them, Orthodoxy is a living, breathing reality; a way of being Christian ultimately rooted in the person of Jesus and the experience of the early church.

On the day that Roswell K. Doughty graduated from Boston University, he also received a commission as a second lieutenant in the army of the United States of America. It was not until 1942 that he was called to active duty—to face some of the toughest fighting of the Second World War. He subsequently saw action in North Africa, then at the disastrous Salerno landings in Italy - where the Allied divisions involved suffered 4,000 casualties—about which the author reveals that suspected intelligence breaches led to the Allies' plans becoming known to the Germans.

Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two ancient lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that seem to hold both the turbulent memories of the region's past and the secret of its enduring allure. Two lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabova's maternal family. As she journeys to her grandmother's place of origin, Kassabova encounters a historic crossroads.

This volume is a collection of some of the best-regarded editorials of Romanian national poet Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889), showcasing his political and economic views. Also includes a new translation of his poem "Prayer of a Dacian" (paperback and Kindle editions only).

In this short, accessible account of the Eastern Orthodox Church, John McGuckin begins by tackling the question "What is the Church?" His answer is a clear, historically and theologically rooted portrait of what the Church is for Orthodox Christianity and how it differs from Western Christians' expectations.

Charles R. King utilizes his academic education in physics and classical history to apply an original analysis to examine one of the most important and misunderstood subjects - the Byzantine Empire and its army. Accessible to both the professional historian and the buff, this analysis enables the reader to approach the Byzantine Army from a new and different outlook. The author uses primary sources and historiography to provide unique insights.

Europe is an astonishingly successful place. In this dazzling new history, best-selling author Simon Jenkins grippingly tells the story of its evolution from warring peoples to peace, wealth and freedom - a story that twists and turns from Greece and Rome, through the Dark Ages, the Reformation and the French Revolution, to the Second World War and up to the present day. Jenkins takes in leaders from Julius Caesar and Joan of Arc to Wellington and Angela Merkel as well as cultural figures from Aristotle to Shakespeare and Picasso.

How you like to live abroad in Albania? What might it be like? Well, in this play, an ordinary American family gets to experience an extraordinary life, when Jack, the head of household gets himself hired to teach English in Tirana, the capital of Albania. This American family will have to deal with less creature comforts such as living in a small apartment, having to take crowded busses to get around town, to the universal problem all outsiders face: not fitting in and feeling a bit unwanted. But they will have to grow and triumph over adversity of being a foreigner in a strange new land, ...

In 1991, an ethnically diverse and peaceful region of Europe descended into violence, lawlessness, bitter hatred and chaos, almost overnight to the bewilderment of international observers. Communities fractured along lines of ethnic and religious affiliation, and the ensuing fighting was deeply personal, resulting in horrific brutality, rape, torture and genocide, causing the deaths of thousands of people. In this book, Alastair Finlan examines the internal upheavals of the former Yugoslavia and their international implications.

From the Koran to Shakespeare, this city with three names - Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul - resonates as an idea and a place, real and imagined. Standing as the gateway between East and West, North and South, it has been the capital city of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. For much of its history it was the very center of the world, known simply as "The City", but, as Bettany Hughes reveals, Istanbul is not just a city but a global story.

Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance? In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only there but also back in the heartland of the West. In this brilliant work of political history, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the supposed end of Communism turned out to be only the beginning of the age of the autocrat.

In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization - in effect a second Russian Revolution - which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief, the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem.

The Gulag - a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners - was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost.

In mysterious, winding sentences gorgeously translated by Jessica Moore, De Kerangal gives us the story of two unlikely souls entwined in a quest for freedom with a striking sense of tenderness, sharply contrasting the brutality of the surrounding world. Racing toward Vladivostok, we meet the young Aliocha, packed onto a Trans-Siberian train with other Russian conscripts. Soon after boarding, he decides to desert and over a midnight smoke in a dark corridor of the train, he encounters an older French woman, Helene, for whom he feels an uncanny trust.

The Palestinian Delusion is unique in situating the Israeli/Palestinian conflict within the context of the global jihad that has found renewed impetus in the latter portion of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Briskly recounting the tumultuous history of the "peace process", Robert Spencer demonstrates that the determination of diplomats, policymakers, and negotiators to ignore this aspect of the conflict has led the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world down numerous blind alleys. This has often only exacerbated, rather than healed, this conflict.