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Homelands

A Personal History of Europe

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Brought to you by Penguin.
Homelands is a stunning blend of contemporary history, reportage and memoir by our greatest writer about European affairs.
Drawing on half a century of interviews and experience, Homelands tells the story of Europe in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries - how, having emerged from its wartime hell in 1945, it slowly recovered and rebuilt, liberated and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe 'whole, free and at peace'. And then faltered.
Humane, expert and deeply felt, Homelands is full of encounters, conversations and anecdote. It is also highly personal: Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying and thinking about Europe and this book is full of life itself, from his father's experience on D-Day, to his teenage French exchange, to interviewing Polish dockers, Albanian guerillas and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents in the UK, Europe, and the US.
Homelands is both a singular history of a period of unprecedented progress and a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong, all the way from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. It culminates in an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.
©2023 Timothy Garton Ash (P)2023 Penguin Audio

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 19, 2023
      In this insightful collection of more than 40 essays, Oxford University historian Ash (Free Speech) artfully weaves together geopolitical analysis with reflections on his travels throughout the European continent since 1971. Along the way, he probes the “paradox” of being a contemporary European: the sense of being “at home abroad,” or feeling like one belongs in countries radically different from their own. Ash, a Brit, traces his own trajectory of becoming “a conscious European” from sometime after “the first schoolboy inhalation of Gauloise tobacco smoke” through his work as journalist reporting from behind the Iron Curtain, peppering his account with fascinating snapshots of a 1978 luncheon at the French home of British aristocrats and notorious fascists Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford, a clandestine 1986 meetup with dissident Czech playwright (and later president) Václav Havel, a 1996 dinnertime chat with former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, and more. Throughout, Ash cogently ties these personal experiences and tidbits of European history to the sweeping changes that altered the continent’s political structure during these years: the creation of the European Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Brexit. As the subtitle suggests, this is not a comprehensive history of Europe, but it’s a scintillating one.

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