Eastern Europe

The story of Eastern Europe is one of successes and failures, competing interests, and the rise and fall of states and empires. The ancient Greek and Roman empires knew the importance of Eastern Europe for trade and settlement. The medieval period would see some of the greatest empires of European history, like Kievan Rus, the Bulgarian Empire, Serbia, and the German Crusader states. By the early modern period, these great states would be replaced by Russia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Ottoman Empire.

The author of the "dazzling epic" (Lev Grossman, Time) Brilliant delivers an indelible view of the ways silence affects those who seek it and those who have it imposed upon them. Through her original, intertwined histories of the penitentiary and the monastery, Jane Brox illuminates the many ways silence is far more complex than any absolute; how it has influenced ideas of the self, soul, and society.

“The MOTTO Effect is an eye-opener for all those who are concerned about staying healthy and their wellbeing.” – Reader’s Favorite Award Prestigious Nautilus Award-winning book! After the birth of her first child, Meena was struck down with severe ill health symptoms that disrupted her life, leaving her exhausted, confused and frustrated as to what was wrong with her. Doctors finally confirmed that she had the Autoimmune disease; Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and gave her the harrowing prognosis of her being stuck with the condition for the rest of her life. Meena refused to accept this...

From a preeminent scholar of Eastern Europe and the prizewinning author of Chernobyl, the essential history of Russian imperialism. In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimea and attempted to seize a portion of Ukraine - only the latest iteration of a centuries-long effort to expand Russian boundaries and create a pan-Russian nation. In Lost Kingdom, award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues that we can only understand the confluence of Russian imperialism and nationalism today by delving into the nation's history.

The 1941 Battle of Moscow, unquestionably one of the most decisive battles of World War II, marked the first strategic defeat of the German armed forces in their seemingly unstoppable march across Europe. The Soviets lost many more people in this one battle than the British and Americans lost in the whole of the Second World War. Now, with authority and narrative power, Rodric Braithwaite tells the story in large part through the individual experiences of ordinary Russian men and women.

During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post-Cold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing.

The country that gave us Vlad Dracula, and whose citizens consider themselves descendants of ancient Rome, has traditionally preferred the status of enigmatic outsider. But this beautiful and unexplored land has experienced some of the most disastrous leaderships of the last century. After a relatively benign period led by a dutiful King and his vivacious British-born Queen, the country oscillated wildly.

Russia's economy and politics under President Vladimir Putin.

John Mosier presents a revisionist retelling of the war on the Eastern Front. The conventional wisdom is that Hitler was mad to think he could defeat the USSR, because of its vast size and population, and that the Battle of Stalingrad marked the turning point of the war. Neither statement is accurate, says Mosier; Hitler came very close to winning outright.

This unflinching account of one remarkable physician’s experiences during the conflict between Russia and its breakaway republic, Chechnya, is an instant classic of war literature. Weaving the history of the Chechnya conflict and the heritage of his own family into the visceral narrative, Dr. Baiev tells a tale that is shocking, heroic, and impossible to forget.

Conozca los antecedentes históricos y el desarrollo de todos los conflictos que surgieron en la república socialista de Yugoslavia a partir de 1991, así como sus consecuencias y la situación actual de los distintos países nacidos tras su disolución: Eslovenia, Croacia, Bosnia y Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro y Macedonia.

Before Madeleine Albright turned twelve, her life was shaken by the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia—the country where she was born—the Battle of Britain, the near total destruction of European Jewry, the Allied victory in World War II, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War. Albright's experiences, and those of her family, provide a lens through which to view the most tumultuous dozen years in modern history.

. A tale of international intrigue that will appeal to military-spy thriller readers around the world, Into Hell's Fire is an action-packed page-turner which pushes the boundaries between fact and fiction. Lucas Martin, a retired contractor of the U.S. government, is recalled to duty to help the U.S. State Department decide its Balkan policy at the beginning of the Siege of Sarajevo. Hired to accumulate accurate intelligence and monitor the crisis as it develops, little time passes before he is ensnared in a deadly struggle with a sinister, Yugoslav general. Crossing regional borders, ...

In May of 2007, in a small, quiet town in the South Moravia region of the Czech Republic, a technical glitch - a simple, accidental crossing of signals - revealed a terrible case of child abuse, and an entire nation watched transfixed with horror as the grisly extent of the perversion of the maternal instinct was revealed. Two small brothers named Jakub and Ondrej, nine and seven years old respectively, were revealed to have suffered confinement, mutilation, psychological brutality, and cannibalism at the hands of several people.

Eighteen years have passed since ten countries from Central & Eastern Europe joined the European Union and more than three decades since the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989—but ignorance about what is popularly still called Eastern Europe is as widespread as ever. Slovenia still gets mixed up with Slovakia, the Slavs remain a mystery in a Europe apparently dominated by Romanic and Germanic nations and a country like the Czech Republic is labelled as Eastern European, although one needs to travel west to get from Vienna to Prague.

Making use of the extensive memoirs of German and Russian soldiers to bring their story to life, the narrative follows on from On A Knife's Edge, which described the encirclement and destruction of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad and the offensives and counter-offensives that followed throughout the winter of 1942-43.

Ukraine's sudden prominence in American politics has compounded an already-widespread misunderstanding of what is actually happening in the nation. In the American media, Ukraine has come to signify an inherently corrupt place, rather than a real country struggling in the face of great challenges. Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know addresses Ukraine's relations with the West, particularly the United States, from the perspective of Ukrainians.

In many ways, we’re more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues? In this gripping investigation, award-winning journalist Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort.

The Caucasus mountains rise at the intersection of Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. A land of astonishing natural beauty and a dizzying array of ancient cultures, the Caucasus for most of the 20th century lay inside the Soviet Union, before movements of national liberation created newly independent countries and sparked the devastating war in Chechnya.

In 2014, George Shetuni took a trip back to his beloved homeland, Albania. Yet, it was not the trip of a life time, so he did not write about it. However, five years later, after some hesitation, George began writing a blog series about his trip, and soon enough he discovered he could not stop writing about it! He wrote about his travel experience, the cities he visited, their history, as well as the general history of Albania, and the current state of things there today, as he saw it. His writing brings the trip back to life and George feels as if he is revisiting Albania, whose spirit ...