Eastern Europe

Culture Smart! Bulgaria provides a key to understanding the Bulgarian people. It outlines their long and complex history, shows you what everyday life is like there today, and offers advice on what to expect and how to navigate unfamiliar cultural terrain. This is a small country of proud and persevering people. Familiarize yourself with their traditions and way of life, and the warmth and hospitality you are shown in return will conquer your heart and bring you back time and again.

The searing accounts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginsberg, and Varlam Shalamov opened the world's eyes to the terrors of the Soviet Gulag. But not until now has there been a memoir of life inside the camps written from the perspective of an actual employee of the Secret police. In this riveting memoir, superbly translated by Deborah Kaple, Fyodor Mochulsky describes being sent to work as a boss at the forced labor camp of Pechorlag in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle.

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.

Whereas for much of human history slavery was somewhat arbitrary, in its later forms, it often had a discriminatory component, typically based on race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. This distinction shows how the practitioners of slavery justified the practice in terms of ideology, and Slavic people were discriminated against within the Ottoman Empire. Slavs had lived in the lands of today’s Eastern European region for centuries.

Greater Than a Tourist - Copenhagen Denmark by Maddie Ipsen offers the inside scope on Copenhagen, Denmark. Most travel books tell you how to travel like a tourist. Although there's nothing wrong with that, as a part of the Greater than a Tourist series, this book will give you travel tips from someone who lives at your travel destination. This book will not tell you exact addresses or store hours but instead will give you an excitement and knowledge from a local that you may not find in other smaller travel books.

Eat like a Local - Malta by author Danielle Eloise offers the inside scoop on food in Malta. Culinary tourism is an important aspect of any travel experience. Food has the ability to tell you a story of a destination, its landscapes, and culture on a single plate. Most food guides tell you how to eat like a tourist.

Inside, you will hear about the history of the Ottoman empire, including: origins until the Balkan conquests; institutions and society: millets, guilds, trade, religion, and mysticism; 15th-century imperial style, 16th-century Golden Age, cracks before World War I; the Eastern Question; and much more!

Concluding his acclaimed series on the Eastern Front in World War I, Prit Buttar comprehensively details not only these climactic events, but also the "successor wars" that raged long after the armistice of 1918. New states rose from the ashes of empire and war raged as German forces sought to keep them under the aegis of the Fatherland. These unresolved tensions between the former Great Powers and the new states would ultimately lead to the rise of Hitler and a new, terrible world war only two decades later.

Through its compelling narrative and comprehensive exploration of Romani history, folklore, and traditions, Don't Call Me Gypsy: A Journey through Czech Romani History and Fairy Tales is an invaluable resource for those interested in Romani culture, heritage, and the Czech Romani community. Embark on an unforgettable journey through this book, gaining a deeper understanding of the enduring legacy of the Romani people in the Czech Republic.

In the volatile and shifting political atmosphere of Eastern Europe after World War II, an inexperienced homicide detective fresh out of the academy is assigned a crime that no one wants to solve. Set in a bombed-out city in an unnamed country formerly occupied by the Germans and now by the Russians, the story follows Emil Brod as he unravels the threads of the cover-up of a brutal murder, while supporting his grandparents, his only family, in the equally brutal city.

In 2009, the acclaimed author of Hitler’s Furies was shown a photograph just brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder, in this case by German officials and Ukrainian collaborators.

The world is full of exciting destinations, but Turkey is full of amazing sights that will take your breath away. Turkey is a prime vacation destination and appeals to a wide range of people. This travel guide will help you to get the most from your stay in my beautiful country.

Defectors fleeing the Soviet Union seized the world's attention during the Cold War. Their stories were given sensational news coverage and dramatized in spy novels and films. Upon reaching the West, they were entitled to special benefits, including financial assistance and permanent residency. In contrast to other migrants, defectors were pursued by the states they left even as they were eagerly sought by the United States and its allies. Defectors follows their treacherous journeys and looks at how their unauthorized flight via land, sea, and air gave shape to a globalized world.

"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.

At the center of the book is a poignant love triangle: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev; the Spanish prima donna Pauline Viardot, with whom Turgenev had a long and intimate relationship; and her husband Louis Viardot, an art critic, theater manager, and republican activist. Together, Turgenev and the Viardots acted as a kind of European cultural exchange - they either knew or crossed paths with Delacroix, Berlioz, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, the Schumanns, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, among many other towering figures.

Al final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial la Unión Soviética controlaba una inmensa extensión de territorio en Europa oriental. Stalin y su policía secreta emprendieron la conversión de doce países radicalmente diferentes a un sistema político y moral totalmente nuevo: el comunismo.

Michał Ogórek meticulously recreates the picture of Poland that used to be drawn during the particular periods of the 100 years of Polish independence: Poland of Piłsudski, Rydz-Śmigły, Bierut, Gomułka, Gierek, Jaruzelski, Wałęsa, and Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński. The more worshiped each of the leaders were, the more painful their demise usually was. The magnitude of the leaders' worship caused people to cry out of emotion, and later out of disappointment and anger. But this book will only make you cry out of laughter.

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.

In 2004 and 2005, striking images from the Ukraine made their way around the world, among them boisterous, orange-clad crowds protesting electoral fraud and the hideously scarred face of a poisoned opposition candidate. Europe's second-largest country but still an immature state only recently independent, Ukraine has become a test case of post-communist democracy, as millions of people in other countries celebrated the protesters' eventual victory.

In Russia's Last Gasp, Prit Buttar looks at one of the bloodiest campaigns launched in the history of warfare - the Brusilov Offensive, sometimes known as the June Advance. With British, French, and German forces locked in a stalemate in the trenches of the Western Front, an attack was launched by the massed Russian armies to the east. The assault was intended to knock Austria-Hungary out of the war and divert German troops from the Western Front, easing the pressure on Russia's allies.