In Europe

Starred review from May 21, 2007
On January 4, 1999, Mak, a journalist and one of the Netherlands' most popular authors, set out from Amsterdam on assignment for his newspaper, the NRC Handelsblad,
to crisscross Europe in the final year before the millennium to discover “what shape the continent was in.” And crisscross he did: Vienna, London; Stalingrad (now Volgograd), Chernobyl, Lourdes, Budapest; Srebrenica and dozens more. For his columns, collected here, Mak used his reporter's eye to describe the vividness of the countryside and cityscapes through which he traveled, his writer's ear to interview individuals who had experienced Europe's most terrible and terrific times, and his historian's pen to narrate the passing of that most extraordinary of centuries. What Mak discovered was that while “Europe” is turning itself into an ostensible “union,” there is unexpectedly “little in the way of a shared historical experience.” There is no European people, for instance, and every nation has conceived its own version of the catastrophic First and Second World Wars. Mak's brilliant compendium is difficult to define—is it a history book, a travelogue, a memoir?—but stands out as a remarkable, insightful, exhilarating exposition on that peculiar continent across the Atlantic. Map.

June 15, 2007
Dutch journalist and historian Mak ("Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City") was commissioned by the respected Dutch newspaper "NRC Handelsblad" to travel throughout Europe for one year reporting on the state of the districts he visited and placing them in the context of their 20th-century past. The result is an absorbing account in 66 short chapters divided by chronological time period (190099) and by the 12 months of the author's journey. Mak is a sensitive and perceptive observer as he takes us through the 20th centuryfrom Verdun to Berlin, from St. Petersburg to Istanbul, from Chernobyl to Srebrenicaweaving history, eyewitness accounts, his own impressions, and ambience into a short narrative that captures in lapidary prose the essence of each place. At nearly 900 pages, this is a doorstopper. But beautifully written, skillfully translated by Garrett, and in its format of short chapters that keeps with its daily newspaper origins, it is suitable for a year's worth of thought and reflection on Europe now and in its tumultuous 20th century. Appropriate for academic and public libraries and essential for collections supporting lovers of nonfiction. [More than 250,000 copies of the original edition sold in Holland.Ed.]Barbara Walden, Univ. of Wisconsin Lib., Madison

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2007
Sweeping in scope, brimmming with luxurious and telling detail, electric in prose style, and deeply comprehending in its understanding of the subject, this Dutch writer's magnum opus is the result of a commission he accepted from the newpaper he worked for: a record ofhis year-long travels throughoutEurope at the end ofthe millennium. His charge was to see if a workable definition ofEurope still had relevancespecifically, if there existssufficientcommonality among the European nations to makeadefinition feasible.Thesecond layer of his writingstakes the form ofhis simultaneous consciousness of the history of each place hevisited; itcamehome to him during his jaunts that all the different stages of the twentieth century are being lived, or relived, somewhere. The history of the twentieth century, he discovered, was indelibly etched into how almostall Europeanshave ledtheir lives at any point in the century. Mak moves thoroughly but nimbly through both time and location, correlating now to then in particularly dramatic episodes, resulting in a beautiful way to learn about bothEuropean history and current events.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)