Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century – And After

This volume is the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of the turmoil and disruptions in the culture of eastern Europe. The work is well documented and written with clarity and accuracy.

There aren't many quality books on the contemporary history of Eastern Europe. Crampton's book is one of the nice exceptions. It is one of the best books on the matter with a lot of curious details on all the countries in the region. I personally use this book as the main text of all my university courses on Eastern/Central Europe and the Cold War. The only shortcoming I can think of is the lack of information on the communist concentration camps in Eastern Europe and their victims.

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.

If, like me, you are no expert on Eastern Europe, then this book is reassuring in that it proves someone out there is. However it really does nothing to help weave a broad picture for the reader or to explain well the context surrrounding the events. I certainly felt less confident about my knowledge of the region after reading it than before. There could be more overview and less detail and this book would not have suffered for it.