Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award 'A
gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and wholly
original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most
indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time' John le Carré In 1989
the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric year Rory MacLean travelled
from Berlin to Moscow, exploring lands that were – for most Brits
and Americans – part of the forgotten half of Europe. Thirty years
on, MacLean traces his original journey backwards, across countries
confronting old ghosts and new fears: from revanchist Russia, through
Ukraine's bloodlands, into illiberal Hungary, and then Poland, Germany
and the UK. Along the way he shoulders an AK-47 to go hunting with
Moscow's chicken Tsar, plays video games in St Petersburg with a
cyber-hacker who cracked the US election, drops by the Che Guevara
High School of Political Leadership in a non-existent nowhereland and
meets the Warsaw doctor who tried to stop a march of 70,000
nationalists. Finally, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he waits
patiently to chat with Mikhail Gorbachev. As Europe sleepwalks into a
perilous new age, MacLean explores how opportunists – both within
and outside of Russia, from Putin to Home Counties populists – have
made a joke of truth, exploiting refugees and the dispossessed, and
examines the veracity of historical narrative from reportage to
fiction and fake news. He asks what happened to the optimism of 1989
and, in the shadow of Brexit, chronicles the collapse of the European
dream.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781408896549
Publisert
2020
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
Bloomsbury Publishing
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter