Eastern Europe

An award-wining and "outrageously entertaining" true crime story (San Francisco Chronicle) about the professional hockey player-turned-bank robber whose bizarre and audacious crime spree galvanized Hungary in the decade after the fall of the Iron Curtain. During the 1990s, while playing for the...

In May of 2007, in a small, quiet town in the South Moravia region of the Czech Republic, a technical glitch - a simple, accidental crossing of signals - revealed a terrible case of child abuse, and an entire nation watched transfixed with horror as the grisly extent of the perversion of the maternal instinct was revealed. Two small brothers named Jakub and Ondrej, nine and seven years old respectively, were revealed to have suffered confinement, mutilation, psychological brutality, and cannibalism at the hands of several people.

Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two ancient lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that seem to hold both the turbulent memories of the region's past and the secret of its enduring allure. Two lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabova's maternal family. As she journeys to her grandmother's place of origin, Kassabova encounters a historic crossroads.

There is a chapter of World War II history that remains largely untold: the story of the fourth largest Allied military of the war, and the only nation to have fought in the battles of Leningrad, Arnhem, Tobruk, and Normandy. This is the story of the Polish forces during the Second World War, the story of millions of young men and women who gave everything for freedom and in the final victory lost all. In a cruel twist of history, the monumental struggles of an entire nation have been largely forgotten, and even intentionally obscured. No Greater Ally redresses the balance,

John Mosier presents a revisionist retelling of the war on the Eastern Front. The conventional wisdom is that Hitler was mad to think he could defeat the USSR, because of its vast size and population, and that the Battle of Stalingrad marked the turning point of the war. Neither statement is accurate, says Mosier; Hitler came very close to winning outright.

Accessible to students, tourists, and general listeners alike, this book provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century. Paul Bushkovitch emphasizes the enormous changes in the understanding of Russian history resulting from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, new material has come to light on the history of the Soviet era, providing new conceptions of Russia's pre-revolutionary past.

'HUGELY IMPRESSIVE' - THE INDEPENDENT 'AN ASTONISHINGLY FINE HISTORY' - COUNTRY LIFE 'FASCINATING' - DAILY MAIL The history of the world's most successful military alliance, from the wrecked Europe of 1945 to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. As they signed NATO into being after World War II...

After being shot down in Nazi-occupied Romania during WWII, a rookie American bomber crew must turn to unlikely allies: Romanian royalty. A thrilling true story from the New York Times bestselling author of A Higher Call, Spearhead, and Devotion It’s July 1943, and every available American...

In Elixir, in a wild river valley and amid the three mountains that define it, Kapka Kassabova seeks out the deep connection between people, plants, and place. The Mesta is one of the oldest rivers in Europe and the surrounding forests and mountains of the southern Balkans are an extraordinarily rich nexus for plant gatherers.

A centuries-long peace is shattered in a matriarchal society when a decade passes without a single girl being born in this sweeping epic fantasy that’s perfect for fans of Robin Hobb and Circe. Five hundred years of peace between queendoms shatters when girls inexplicably stop being born. As...

Discover the remarkable history of the Crimean War...The Crimean War was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 19th century, but it is also one of the least remembered. More men died in the Crimean War than in the American Civil War which followed soon after. Yet the Crimean War is important for a number of reasons. Although it did not change the map of Europe and did not directly cause the fall of any of the combatants, it did indirectly shape the second half of the 19th century and the early years of the twentieth century in Europe.

Are you thinking about a vacation in Spain? Do you want to be well prepared and well informed, so that you can get the most out of your experience? Spain is a marvelous country, packed with history, great tourist resorts, an interior that boasts epic natural beauty and people who are warm and welcoming. Now you can share in everything that Spain has to offer, with Discover Spain: The Ultimate Travel Guide for Exploring Spain Like a Local.

In September 1939, a 10-year-old boy, Micha Giedroyc watched the Russian security police seize his home in eastern Poland. His father, a senator and judge, was imprisoned while his mother, with Micha and his two sisters, were left on the streets of the local town to fend for themselves. Later they were transported in cattle trucks to the wastes of Soviet Siberia, with hundreds of thousands of other deportees. 'Here, by the will of the rulers of the Soviet Empire, we were to toil and die.'

Written with a thrilling narrative pull, The Butcher's Trail chronicles the pursuit and capture of the Balkan war criminals indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. Borger recounts how Radovan Karadžic and Ratko Mladic - both now on trial in The Hague - were finally tracked down and describes the intrigue behind the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president who became the first head of state to stand before an international tribunal for crimes perpetrated in a time of war.

Writer Hadley Freeman investigates her family’s secret history in this “exceptional” (The Washington Post) “masterpiece” (The Daily Telegraph) uncovering a story that spans a century, two World Wars, and three generations. Hadley Freeman knew her grandmother Sara lived in France just...

Najeeb s dearest wish is to work in the Gulf and earn enough money to send back home. He achieves his dream only to be propelled by a series of incidents, grim and absurd, into a slave-like existence herding goats in the middle of the Saudi desert. Memories of the lush, verdant landscape...

Despite the best efforts of a number of historians, many aspects of the ferocious struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War remain obscure or shrouded in myth. One of the most persistent of these is the notion - largely created by many former members of its own officer corps in the immediate postwar period - that the German Army was a paragon of military professionalism and operational proficiency whose defeat on the Eastern Front was solely attributable to the amateurish meddling of a crazed former Corporal.

"The Greatest Story Ever ToldDispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins-the Pandavas and the Kouravas-but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular and commonplace. Throughout the epic, characters...

"Bloodlands" ist eines jener seltenen Bücher, die mit einem Schlag den Blick auf die Geschichte verändern. Weltweit in mehr als vierzig Sprachen übersetzt, hat sein Titel sogar Eingang in die Alltagssprache gefunden. Timothy Snyder führt darin zusammen, was bis dahin getrennt betrachtet worden war und wenig miteinander zu tun zu haben schien: die Ermordung von 14 Millionen Menschen, die im Namen unterschiedlicher Ideologien sterben mussten, deren gewaltsamer Tod aber eine auffallende Gemeinsamkeit hatte.

In The Holocaust by Bullets, Father Patrick Desbois documented for the first time the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during World War II, based on wartime documents, interviews with locals, and the application of modern forensic practices on long-hidden gravesites. Nearly a decade of further work by his team, drawing on interviews with 5,000 neighbors of the Jews, has resulted in stunning new findings about the extent and nature of the genocide.