Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century - And After

by Richard Crampton

Book Overview

Covering all key Eastern European states and their history right up to the collapse of communism, this second edition of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century - And After is a comprehensive political history of Eastern Europe taking in the whole of the century and the geographical area.

Focusing on the attempt to create and maintain a functioning democracy, this new edition now:

examines events in Bosnia and Herzegovina includes...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415164230
• ISBN13: 9780415164238
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 552 Pages
• Weight: 3.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

20th Century Easter Europe

I am an early modern european historian, the 20th century has not been a focus for me, however, Crampton's book has been a wonderful source of information on this time period. Understanding what happened in the 20th century helps those of us who are interested, make sense of the 21st century. Eastern Europe is a complicated area, to understand the nuances of diplomacy, the Austrian-Hungarian empire and how Russis played a part in the formation of WWI is invaluable. Well written, lots of good information and a great springboard for further study.

Comprehensive, detailed, and scholarly.

I am not an authority on Eastern Europe; I read this book as a (very successful) undergraduate in social sciences. I enjoyed the thorough, methodically-organized text. Crampton divides the text into time periods or event trends, and examines each country's experience in detail. The organization is this text's strongest point. Its other great asset is the degree of detail. It combines a historian's "big-picture" view of trends with a nearly journalistic (I hope the word doesn't offend!) chronology of political events at crucial moments. This pair of perspectives, together with the fact that headings make it easy to identify sections for quick reference, made this a really good book for me.Now the downside: all of this detail makes the book terribly long. The prose, particularly in early sections, is unnecessarily verbose and not particularly well-constructed. I am quite comfortable reading academic texts; this one could be better. Teachers using this text should include some sort of geography primer; I think that even if Americans were geographically compotent, we would need help with some of these references to non-political regional names. I do not consider this a weakness, however, and generally endorse this text; my course used several of these chronologies, and this was easily the best. If your students will read 500+ pages of rather obscure text, Crampton will serve you very well.