Showing titles in Eastern

The battle of Stalingrad was the turning point of World War II. The German capture of the city, their encirclement by Soviet forces shortly afterwards, and the hard-fought but futile attempts to relieve them, saw bitter attritional fighting and extremes of human misery inflicted on both sides. In this title, a renowned expert on warfare on the Eastern Front reveals the often-overlooked German counteroffensive post-Stalingrad, and how it prevented the whole Axis front line from collapsing.

A prize-winning historian’s major new history of the Second World War, arguing that Stalin’s USSR was the war’s driving force. “A provocative revisionist take on the Second World War … McMeekin is a formidable researcher.” —Financial Times We remember World War II as a struggle...

From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the 20th century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy. Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, and greeted with critical acclaim as "the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date" (The Boston Globe), Kaplan's prescient, enthralling, and often chilling political travelogue is already a modern classic.

Brought to you by Penguin. Central Europe is not just a space on a map but also a region of shared experience - of mutual borrowings, impositions and misapprehensions. From the Roman Empire onwards, it has been the target of invasion from the east. In the Middle Ages, Central Europeans cast...

A vivid, brilliant, darkly humorous and horrifying history of some of the strangest dictators that Europe has ever seen. 'A witty and page-turning narrative full of grotesque characters' Misha Glenny 'Kenyon relates all this with verve [and] humour ... He patiently untangles the complicated webs...

Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a masterful narrative about a place that has survived the brink of being forgotten. Beginning with long-lost accounts of early pagan life, Mikanowski offers a kaleidoscopic tour recounting the rise and fall of the great empires—Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian—the dawn of the modern era, the ravages of fascism and communism, as well as capitalism, the birth of the modern nation-state, and more.

The sacrifices that enabled the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-45 are sacrosanct. The foundation of their eventual victory was laid during the battle for the city of Stalingrad, resting on the banks of the river Volga. For Germany, the catastrophic defeat was the beginning of their eventual demise that would see the Red Army two years later flying their flag of victory above the Reichstag. Stalingrad is seen as the pivotal battle of the Second World War.

Since its beginnings, Poland has been a moving target, geographically as well as demographically, and the very definition of who is a Pole has been in flux. In the late medieval and early modern periods, the country grew to be the largest in continental Europe, only to be later wiped off the map for more than a century. Yet even under these constraints, Poles persisted in their desire to wrest from their oppressors a modicum of national dignity and, ultimately, managed to achieve much more than that.

The Crimea was one of the crucibles of the war on the Eastern Front, where first a Soviet and then a German army were surrounded, fought desperate battles, and were eventually destroyed. The fighting in the region was unusual for the Eastern Front in many ways, in that naval supply, amphibious landings, and naval evacuation played major roles, while both sides were also conducting ethnic cleansing as part of their strategy - the Germans eliminating the Jews and the Soviets purging the region of Tartars.

The first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Empires of the Silk Road represents a fundamental rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of this major world region. Christopher Beckwith describes the rise and fall of the great Central Eurasian empires, including those of the Scythians, Attila the Hun, the Turks and Tibetans, and Genghis Khan and the Mongols.

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Hugely enjoyable' The Spectator 'Delivered with flamboyance, it features a sparkling cast of chancers' KATJA HOYER, Daily Telegraph 5* review 'Page-turning . . . a sizzling high-stakes tale' JAMES HOLLAND 'This book might read like the...

Making use of the extensive memoirs of German and Russian soldiers to bring their story to life, the narrative follows on from On A Knife's Edge, which described the encirclement and destruction of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad and the offensives and counter-offensives that followed throughout the winter of 1942-43. 

Bloomsbury presents The Collapse of Yugoslavia by Alastair Finlan, read by Ric Jerrom. An accessible introduction to the brutal conflict in the former Yugoslavia, one of the greatest yet least understood tragedies of the 20th century. In 1991, an ethnically diverse and peaceful region of Europe...

In 1940, the Polish Underground wanted to know what was happening inside the recently opened Auschwitz concentration camp. Polish army officer Witold Pilecki volunteered to be arrested by the Germans and report from inside the camp. His intelligence reports, smuggled out in 1941, were among the first eyewitness accounts of Auschwitz atrocities: the extermination of Soviet POWs, its function as a camp for Polish political prisoners, and the "final solution" for Jews. Pilecki received brutal treatment until he escaped in April 1943; soon after, he wrote a brief report....

‘Compassionate and compelling, this is not a political story but a quest for love in the heart of darkness’ Simon Sebag Montefiore ‘A biography on an epic scale, with a combination of tragedy and history worthy of a Russian novel’ Independent ‘Superbly well told’ Sunday Times Who was...

Anyone who has glimpsed the long, mountainous, island-studded Dalmatian coast would surely agree that its beauty is little short of divine. Croatia, quite simply, is blessed with some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet, and its history is equally captivating. A Traveller's History of Croatia offers tourists and travellers an inside look at how the country's cultural fusion of Mediterranean, Central European and Balkan influences has given it a tumultuous past.

The brilliant untold story of three daughters of diplomacy: Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill, and Kathleen Harriman, glamorous, fascinating young women who accompanied their famous fathers to the Yalta Conference with Stalin in the waning days of World War II. With victory close at hand, the...

Ukraine's sudden prominence in American politics has compounded an already-widespread misunderstanding of what is actually happening in the nation. In the American media, Ukraine has come to signify an inherently corrupt place, rather than a real country struggling in the face of great challenges. Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know addresses Ukraine's relations with the West, particularly the United States, from the perspective of Ukrainians.

Brought to you by Penguin. From the prize-winning author of Ring of Steel, a gripping history of the First World War's longest and most terrible siege In the autumn of 1914 Europe was at war. The battling powers had already suffered casualties on a scale previously unimaginable. On both the...

The story of Eastern Europe is one of successes and failures, competing interests, and the rise and fall of states and empires. The ancient Greek and Roman empires knew the importance of Eastern Europe for trade and settlement. The medieval period would see some of the greatest empires of European history, like Kievan Rus, the Bulgarian Empire, Serbia, and the German Crusader states. By the early modern period, these great states would be replaced by Russia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Ottoman Empire.