JACOB MIKANOWSKI is a historian, a freelance journalist and a critic. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Aeon, Cabinet, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Guardian, The New York Times, newyorker.com, The Point, The Awl, Atlas Obscura, Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Berkeley, CA.
A Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 from BookPage
A Best Book of the Summer from Bloomberg
“Stunningly elegant. . . . Absolutely incredible.”
—Julia Ioffe, Puck
“Mikanowski manages to pull off the nearly impossible—an accessible
and detailed history of Eastern Europe that spans 2,000 years in
under 400 pages.”
—BookPage, “The Best Nonfiction of 2023”
“Goodbye, Eastern Europe traces the stories of the various peoples
who have called the region home for the past thousand years,
chronicling every period of war and peace, myth and truth, and
glory and defeat. . . . Captivating.”
—Princeton Alumni Weekly
“[A] kaleidoscopic guide to Eastern Europe’s past. . . . As
democracy retreats and a new war rages. . . . One must wonder if
its future will resemble the vanished world that Jacob Mikanowski
vividly brings to life.”
—The Washington Times
“A major new work. . . . Mikanowski weaves a rich and amusing
tapestry of historical anecdote and personal family history. . . .
[and] aims to push back against simplistic, atavistic nationalisms
which have defined the post-Communist era.”
—Balkan Insight
“The enormous contradiction of a single, vast geopolitical region
that evinces a stereotype-defeating multiplicity is captured
brilliantly . . . in Goodbye, Eastern Europe. . . . Taut and lucid.
. . . An elegiac history.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Mikanowski’s undertaking is a massive one. . . . Moving . . .
Powerful . . . Impressive . . . [There is] something special about
the place that was once called Eastern Europe. Try to name that
special quality and it turns to ash in your mouth. But try, this
book seems to say, to hold onto it anyway, even if it’s both in
your grasp and slipping away.”
—The Washington Post
“Mikanowski manages to pull off the nearly impossible: An
accessible and detailed history of Eastern Europe that spans 2,000
years. . . . This very personal perspective gives depth and
humanity . . . along with urgency.”
—BookPage
“Mikanowski is highly adept at capturing the milieu of each period.
. . . This articulate overview conveys an important, broader
description of the societies with which millions of Jews once
coexisted. . . . A well-written and enlightening read.”
—The Jewish Chronicle
“Impressive. . . . Educational and timely . . . For anyone wanting
to more fully understand the stakes for the region, and world.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“The last millennium hasn’t been kind to people living in the area
we call Eastern Europe. . . . [Mikanowski] has timed his book all
too well: After a post-Soviet period of relative calm, Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine has brought the unlucky region into the
spotlight once again.”
—Bloomberg
“This phenomenal debut from journalist and historian Mikanowski is
partly a nostalgic attempt to preserve the culture of a
disappearing region and partly a boisterous defense of its legacy.
. . . Gripping . . . Informative, deeply engaging. . . . This
timely book will appeal to readers seeking a fresh take on European
history.”
—Library Journal, starred review
“Ambitious. . . . Stunning. . . . Shot through with lyrical
reflections and astute analysis, this is a rewarding portrait of a
diverse and complex part of the world.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“An epic history. . . . of a part of the world too often ignored,
told with vigor, color, and authority.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Do not rush to bid farewell to Eastern Europe until reading this
book. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this very
personal story of the place that one can’t find on the map pays
tribute to the origins of the experiences, cultures and ideas that
continue to shape political and ideological battles of the modern
world.”
—Serhii Plokhy, author of The Last Empire
“With the war in Ukraine, Eastern Europe is once again helping
determine the world’s future, as it did at several key moments in
the 20th century. Yet for all its historical importance and
cultural richness, the region remains a blank on many outsiders’
mental maps. In this dramatic and wide-ranging book, Jacob
Mikanowski makes Eastern Europe come to life by rooting its history
in individual human stories, showing how diverse peoples lived
together from the Middle Ages to the Holocaust and beyond.”
—Adam Kirsch, author of The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish
People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century
“This wonderful book is a firework display: an unforgettable flash
of forgotten past, black humour, wild messianic cult or genocidal
horror bursts out of almost every page. Mikanowski, whose own
dangerously hybrid family emerged from what he calls this
“landscape of rapturous diversity,” has written a chronicle rather
than a history, a narrative of Eastern Europe which is about
personal experiences rather than the crimes and glories of its
leaders. He is a master raconteur whose anecdotes show that
grotesque events are serious as well as comic. It matters that
Hucul people thought God made the world out of cream. It is not
just laughable that Baron von Chaos was put in charge of the
Habsburg royal mint (which he promptly embezzled). Mikanowski shows
that the vast regions between Germany and Russia are not just a
zone of blood and tragedy, but of marvellous human vigour and
resilience.”
—Neal Ascherson, author of The Black Sea
“Jacob Mikanowski has taken on the seemingly impossible task of
writing a comprehensive history of that "Other" Europe, hoping to
catch a myriad of vanishing worlds. My initial scepticism was
quickly dispelled. Goodbye Eastern Europe succeeds in delighting
even a jaded follower of matters East European like me. It
is a richly informative and readable book which starts
with the Dark Ages and ends with our own even darker era, ranging
from the Baltics to the Balkans and covering an enormous
swathe of land, describing the ever shifting frontiers and
changing nationalities in the course of a historical narrative as
vibrant as the area it describes.”
—Vesna Goldsworthy, author of The Iron Curtain
“A rich, counterintuitive history told with flair, Goodbye Eastern
Europe is both a tour of an often-misunderstood part of the world
and an examination of political fault lines that continue to shape
our lives today.”
—Daniel Trilling, author of Light in the Distance
“Goodbye Eastern Europe is a collective portrait of people, places,
states and ideas, most of which no longer exist. Beautifully
written and witty, it presents the region as a place full of magic,
vibrancy, diversity, conflict and coexistence. Mikanowski blends
together reality and myth, poetry and historical research, personal
experience and ideologies to revive and bring us back the
civilization that was lost during the calamitous
twentieth century but that is still crucial to Eurasian
history.”
—Eugene Finkel, Kenneth H. Keller Associate Professor of
International Affairs
“A highly captivating book that delights on every page and dispels
the ‘damaging stereotypes’ and ‘dour connotations’ traditionally
associated with Eastern Europe. Far more than a simple history,
Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a magical swan song for an astonishingly
diverse but disappearing world of peasants and poets, resilience
and romance, calamity and fantasy, where a shared affinity for the
absurd has long been essential for survival.”
—Rebecca Lowe, author of The Slow Road to Tehran
“[Mikanowski] takes an appealingly wide-ranging and eclectic
approach to this region of shifting borders and multi-layered
identities. . . . A captivating and revealing book.”
—Geographical Magazine (UK)
“An eloquent and absorbing new plea for the retention of the idea
of Eastern Europe. . . . Emphasising how there is far more to the
region than post-Sovietness, this is a wonderful exploration forged
by a deep love of Europe.”
—New European (UK)
“[Mikanowski] challenges the simplifying and often false narratives
written by those in power. . . . part history, part sentimental
journey. . . . Goodbye, Eastern Europe reads more like a western
(but in the east) than a traditional history. . . . Mikanowski
continues the process that began with the 1989 revolutions of
unearthing the alternative stories that exist on the margins of
history, in the soil, in literature, in the landscape.”
—Irish Independent (UK)
“An intriguing attempt to trace the residual power of those who are
no longer there . . . [an] intimate history.”
—Financial Times (UK)
“A light, panoramic portrait of a region that has left a lasting
mark on the literary and cultural history of Europe, [Goodbye,
Eastern Europe] may well be the most readable overview of Eastern
European history yet written. . . . Complexity that usually appears
impenetrable unravels seamlessly through unique threads of
history.”
—History Today Magazine (UK)
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