A review by bellatora
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, by Tony Judt
5.0
I'm a history nut, but my specialty is pre-20th century. In fact, post-WWII history is my least favorite kind. I also am young enough that only the last chapter or two contained events that I saw on the news or read about in the paper. Given that, while I had a general idea of the outline of post-WWII Europe (Marshall Plan, USSR, fall of the Berlin wall, bloodshed in Bosnia/Kosovo), I discovered--to my embarassment--that a lot of this book contained material of which I was ignorant. For example, before reading this if you had asked me who Tito was, I would have guessed some black and white film star or the Lone Ranger's friend (who is in fact named Tanto) and not that he was the Yugoslavian dictator (and even Yugoslavia was some vague, half-known concept to me before reading this book).
Postwar is impressive for containing so much information and still being so readable. Still, it suffers the same faults that every general history inevitably suffers from: having too many names to keep track of, skimming over some events/people (sometimes assuming knowledge that I didn't have), and including lots of statistics necessary to illustrate a point but that tend to be overwhelming for the reader. However, if you don't try to follow every bit of minutiae and don't try to keep track of the abundance of names and instead focus on the general trends and themes, you will be well-served (and many of the more imporant names should already be familiar: Hitler, Stalin, Yeltsin, Thatcher, etc.). Another thing to keep in mind is that this is predominately a political and economic history and not the social history I tend to prefer. So while there are some interesting historical anecdotes and obversations on aspects of European culture, these are few and far between. To me, this makes the book a bit drier than the popular histories I tend to read. However, I was a history major and know a dull scholarly text when I see one. It might be long and it might be fact-heavy but it is also informative, clear and digestable for a historical dilettante.
Postwar is impressive for containing so much information and still being so readable. Still, it suffers the same faults that every general history inevitably suffers from: having too many names to keep track of, skimming over some events/people (sometimes assuming knowledge that I didn't have), and including lots of statistics necessary to illustrate a point but that tend to be overwhelming for the reader. However, if you don't try to follow every bit of minutiae and don't try to keep track of the abundance of names and instead focus on the general trends and themes, you will be well-served (and many of the more imporant names should already be familiar: Hitler, Stalin, Yeltsin, Thatcher, etc.). Another thing to keep in mind is that this is predominately a political and economic history and not the social history I tend to prefer. So while there are some interesting historical anecdotes and obversations on aspects of European culture, these are few and far between. To me, this makes the book a bit drier than the popular histories I tend to read. However, I was a history major and know a dull scholarly text when I see one. It might be long and it might be fact-heavy but it is also informative, clear and digestable for a historical dilettante.