Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2017 -

Coeditors Furst and McLellan have edited a new collection of essays that illuminate the diverse ways that citizens of the Soviet Union and East European countries did not conform to the expectations of communist society during the second half of the 20th century. The 12 essays are engaging and show a side of late socialist society that has not been fully explored by scholars before. Part I includes essays on yoga in Romania, hippies in Estonia, and student activists in Yugoslavia. Part II addresses smuggled literature (samizdat) and peace movements in the Soviet Union. One of the most intriguing essays addresses the use of Commodore 64 computers during the 1980s in Poland and how that had an impact on late Cold War politics. The five chapters in the last two sections explore an eclectic range of rebellious movements, including living in communes, punk rock music, and squatting in housing developments. This is an imaginative collection of essays that sheds new light on how at least some people lived in the last decades of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries.

As Islam in Europe continues to animate the lives of all citizens, the need to clarify the depth of the faith in the history of the continent is clear. This welcome translation of this collaborative work by Clayer and Bourgarel (both of EHESS in Paris) helps introduce readers to an important clarification of European Islam that has evolved over centuries. While providing an overview of the history of Islam since the arrival of the Ottoman Empire, the primary focus is the critical 19th and 20th centuries, a period in which major political shifts directly impacted Muslim Europeans. As a new political order emerged with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, millions of Muslims--Albanians, Slavs, Turks, Roma, Pomaks/Bulgarians--were compelled to leave or convert. The remnants of this Muslim polity are the focus of this excellent study, which should help students appreciate the increasing links between ethnonationalism in the 19th century, the modern state, and how Balkan Muslims have navigated the last hundred years of transition, including the fall of communism and the wars in the former Yugoslavia.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

Khiterer (Millersville Univ.) has written a richly detailed, well-organized history of her native city, Kiev, Ukraine. The book reflects her intimate knowledge of the city and very extensive archival research in Kiev, as well as broad familiarity with a wealth of other published and unpublished primary and secondary sources. The author includes numerous concisely detailed biographical sketches of representative Jewish figures in Kiev during the 70 years before the Second Russian Revolution in February 1917. She seeks to resolve the conundrum of Jewish Kiev: was it a very Jewish city or "the inferno of Russian Israel," as characterized by the classic Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow? Kiev's Jews were repeatedly expelled from a city that was in the center of the Jewish Pale of Settlement yet technically beyond the Pale. An important administrative, religious, and commercial center, Kiev attracted many impoverished Jews seeking opportunity, including the famous Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem. In this model of professional and careful research and analysis, Khiterer weaves the threads of a fascinating historical tapestry of one of czarist Russia's largest Jewish communities in the traditional seat of Russian Orthodox Christianity.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.

In Eastern Europe, Romania has always been the odd man out. Romanians speak a Romance language and lived under Ottoman rule for centuries, and they share borders with Ukraine, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Romania does not fit most stereotypes about the lands between "western" Europe and Russia. Abraham, lecturer in political studies in Bucharest, provides an accessible, sophisticated, scholarly account of major trends in Romania's history since 1945. He begins with a short introduction to Romania during WW II, then embarks on a convincing explanation of the internal dynamics of the Romanian communist party, which landed Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and his successor, Nicolae Ceausescu, in positions of almost unchallenged power. Coverage of the communist period (particularly the bizarre form of dynastic communism Ceausescu inflicted on Romania) is admirable, but the author's greatest contribution is the very detailed explanation of Romania's meandering political path since 1989, which takes up two-thirds of the book. Abraham discusses party politics, political institutions, foreign policy, legal developments, society, economy, and demography. Though the level of detail may seem forbidding for students, the author's clear writing makes the sometimes baffling events of the past quarter century come to life, often vividly. For anyone interested in recent historical developments in one of the EU's youngest members.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

This new work on Stalin's era has rather unusual origins. In 2010, Baberowski (Humboldt Univ., Berlin) started revising his 2003 book on Stalin's terror, Der rote Terror (The Red Terror), with the intention of preparing it for an English translation. As the author worked on the revision, he discovered that many of his conclusions from his original work were no longer valid and so, in essence, he started over and produced this current work. It is rare that an author will revise his own book, but this work is compelling and enjoyable to read. The author asserts that Stalin initiated an era of mass violence where the violence itself was the point for many who carried it out. This culture of violence is what defined Stalin's era and Soviet history for many decades. The brutality Baberowski illuminates is extraordinary and disturbing. The book is well researched, well written, and adds much to understanding of Stalin's era, even if the author had to revise his own conclusions.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries.

Journalist Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in literature, has published an intriguing new work that examines the lives of ordinary Russians from the collapse of communism in the early 1990s into the second decade of the 21st century. Using extensive interviews, the author reveals a complex picture of post-Soviet Russia that often defies propaganda and media accounts about the new Russia. Alexievich experiments with a new style of writing that combines oral history with traditional reporting, which results in a compelling, useful account of contemporary Russia. The work also reveals what ordinary Russians think of their Soviet past. Even though communism collapsed in the Soviet Union over 25 years ago, the power of that idea and regime has continued to influence Russia in both positive and negative ways. Probably the greatest contribution of this work is the chronicling of the varied views of contemporary Russia woven into a compelling story that grips readers from beginning to end. This work will be influential for its literary and historical merit.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.

Holmes's principal contribution to the historiography on Soviet Russia's "Second Great Fatherland War" (elsewhere known as WW II) is neatly summed up in the subtitle of the book. The "master narrative" about the successful relocation of a significant part of the Soviet Union's industrial sector to the rear, which was necessitated by the German invasion and occupation of large swaths of Soviet territory, rightly chronicles the enormous effort and sacrifices made by its people, which ultimately provided the tools and materiel needed to defeat the Nazi invaders. While acknowledging these heroics, Holmes (emer., Univ. of South Alabama) also provides a much-needed (and still relevant) analysis of the problems engendered by the mass migrations of peoples and the tensions that inevitably arise between hosts and refugees (or, in this case, evacuees), as well as a nuanced explication of the political conflicts between the "center" and the periphery that does much to reveal the nature of the Soviet regime in both war and peace. This fine study, which continues the relatively recent turn in the field to regional approaches, is superbly researched and obviously the result of much time spent in the provinces' libraries and archives.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.

In this deeply researched, well-written study, Monahan (history, Univ. of New Mexico) takes issue with the conventional portrayal of early modern Russia as an autocratic, inept, abusive empire that effectively throttled economic growth with its lack of support for its undercapitalized merchants. She seeks to replace this "failure narrative" with an image of pre-Petrine Russia as fully integrated in the world historical narrative of early modern commercial expansion and uses the vast canvass of Siberia, a land typically associated with little more than fur and exile, to make her point. In eight chapters, the author demonstrates that Russia's eastern trade was far more extensive than previously thought, that it was an essential element in Moscow's empire building, and that the state made up for its inability to control its far-flung borderlands by pragmatically facilitating commerce through mediation, regulation, and participation. The first two chapters discuss the nature of the relationship between state and trade; the final three chapters examine the actual "merchants of Siberia," offering fine-grained portraits of major family enterprises. Highly readable, this important study is bound to overturn ideas about Eurasian trade in the early modern period.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All public and academic levels/libraries.

Contrary to a widely held view that sees different nationalist associations in the Balkans leading to violence, historian Bergholz (Concordia Univ., Montreal) reveals how violence, not the peoples' "nature," divides otherwise peaceful neighbors. Over two "terrifying days and nights in early September 1941," the violence visited upon Kulen Vakuf in a borderland region in Bosnia induced a change in how people perceived themselves. Challenging how perceptions of commonalities of shared ethnicities and of "others" whose differences set the lines of distinction, this original book offers readers a new appreciation for how nationalist practices modify behavior. As a few individuals took charge and violently changed the nature of intra-communal relations, the violence functioned as the fulcrum of change, not something that simply always existed. This interdisciplinary work thus undermines much of the scholarship on the Balkans' recent history. The highly readable story Bergholz tells offers scholars and students an important set of insights into reconsidering assumptions about ethnicity, nationalism, and the often-assumed violent relations between "different" people in the Balkans and, indeed, the larger world.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.