Homelands

Brilliant, to use a very British appraisal of something that is quite good. The Author uses his memoir to its full effect, adding personal anecdotes to his "spot on" assessment of Europe's long march from "after the war, to after the wall", and further, to the current circumstances resulting in war in Ukraine. This Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, UK, has first hand accounts of a divided Berlin, strikes in Gdansk, the velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia. 

He is also quite thorough in his critique of Brexit, and the drift back towards isolationist, hyper national, strongmen and women. Overall, despite the current warning signs, the long view that he provides is optimistic. Ultimately, as with Sir David Attenborough's "A Life on Our Planet", Garton Ash uses his witness testimony as a call for Europeans to understand and defend the progress that Europe has made since the second world war.