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 Winner of the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize * A Financial Times Best Book of 2023 "An irresistibly well-written book, fluent, witty, and intelligent."--Neal Acherson, New York Review of Books 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 in time and space 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, to triumph with the fall of the Berlin Wall, to democratize and unite. And then to falter.