This is a hefty volume -- more than 1100 pages of text, and several hundred more of notes -- but the only dry thing about it is the humor (of which there are discreet but lovely examples). Davies, a British scholar who specializes in Eastern Europe, has written a comprehensive study of the chunk of land we call Europe from prehistoric times to the fall of the Soviet Union. It's slow, detailed, but fascinating going, and Davies breaks up the text with "time capsules": boxes of digressions from a couple paragraphs to a couple pages which focus on specific subjects, from the history of printing to the origin of the term "jeans." Lots of details about individuals and mass movements stick in the memory, such as the way French Republican officers executed great numbers of revolutionaries in 1794 Nantes by repeatedly sinking a ship with prisoners chained aboard. Davies has an eye for irony and humor: Lenin owned a Rolls Royce, he notes; medieval Constantinople gathered sacred relics such as "two fragments of the True Cross ... the Crown of Thorns, the Sacred Lance, the Virgin's Girdle, and several heads of John the Baptist"; and the Nazis championed "the tall, slim, blond, Nordic type -- as tall as Goebbels, as slim as Goering, as blond as Hitler...." Unless you're retired, don't expect to dispose of this in a week or two; I dipped into it for months on end.
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The review of this Book prepared by David Loftus
