Garton Ash y 1989 en la NY review of books

En el Volumen 56, Número 17 del New York Review of Books encontré este trabajo interesante de Timothy Garton Ash, quien ha escrito sobre el tema inumerables trabajos. En la misma revista se pueden encontrar varias colaboraciones suyas sobre la caída del muro y el desarrollo de los países de Europa central y del este.

Garton Ash es: Professor of European Studies and Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. His books include Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name and, as editor (with Adam Roberts), Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Gandhi to the Present.

Estoy leyendo el libro de Victor Sebestyen, es excelente da un panorama sobre la URSS y los seis satélites durante la última década del comunismo. Lo recomiendo ampliamente.

NYRB November 5, 2009

1989!
By Timothy Garton Ash

BOOKS DRAWN ON FOR THIS ESSAY
1989: The Struggle to Create Post–Cold War Europe
by Mary Elise Sarotte
Princeton University Press, 321 pp., $29.95
Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment
by Stephen Kotkin, with a contribution by Jan T. Gross
Modern Library, 197 pp., $24.00
Der Vorhang Geht Auf: Das Ende der Diktaturen in Osteuropa
by György Dalos
Munich: C.H. Beck, 272 pp., e19.90
The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall
by Michael Meyer
Scribner, 255 pp., $26.00
Histoire secrète de la chute du mur de Berlin
by Michel Meyer
Paris: Odile Jacob, 348 pp., e21.00 (paper)
Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire
by Victor Sebestyen
Pantheon, 451 pp., $30.00
The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989
edited by Jeffrey A. Engel
Oxford University Press, 186 pp., $27.95
There Is No Freedom Without Bread! 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism
by Constantine Pleshakov
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 289 pp., $26.00
Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President, and the Speech That Ended the Cold War
by Romesh Ratnesar
Simon and Schuster, 240 pp., $27.00
Unsurprisingly, the twentieth anniversary of 1989 has added to an already groaning shelf of books on the year that ended the short twentieth century. If we extend "1989" to include the unification of Germany and disunification of the Soviet Union in 1990–1991, we should more accurately say the three years that ended the century. The anniversary books include retrospective journalistic chronicles, with some vivid personal glimpses and striking details (Victor Sebestyen, György Dalos, Michael Meyer, and Michel Meyer), spirited essays in historical interpretation (Stephen Kotkin and Constantine Pleshakov), and original scholarly work drawing on archival sources as well as oral history (Mary Elise Sarotte and the volume edited by Jeffrey Engel). I cannot review them individually. Most add something to our knowledge; some add quite a lot. It is no criticism of any of these authors to say that I come away dreaming of another book: the global, synthetic history of 1989 that remains to be written.

Leer completo aquí

—This is the first of two articles. A sequel will look at the post-1989 history and prospects of "velvet revolution."