A Concise History of Poland (Cambridge Concise Histories) Review

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(More customer reviews)If you have no knowledge of Polish history, this book is a good place the start. The authors recommend Playground of the Gods if you are looking for a more detailed history of Poland, but I haven't read those yet so I can't "offically" recommend them.
This book covers basic events and ideas that occured in Poland for the past 1000 years. In addition to politics and military events, the authors attempt to list cultural figures, such as Chopin, and how those figures reflected or affected Polish events.
There were few details on events most people normally think about when they think of Poland, such as concentration camps and WWII. However, these issues aren't ignored entirely, just given the same coverage as other events in Polish history.

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The second edition of this guide to Poland has been updated to take account of the years from 1989-2005. This period marked its liberation from the Soviet Union, the birth of Poland's 'Third Republic' and, recently, its accession to the European Union in 2004. Poland's history has been marked by its resilience. Once a dominant force in central and eastern Europe and home to a remarkable experiment in consensual politics, it was excised from the map by its neighbours in 1795. Resurrected in 1918, partitioned afresh during the Second World War, it survived to become a satellite of the Soviet Union. Yet in the 1980s, it was Poland which blazed the trail in casting off communism, and was finally able to reassert its Christian heritage. With its updated bibliography and new chronology, the book is the ideal companion for all looking for a comprehensive survey of this fascinating country.

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The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and Their Culture Review

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(More customer reviews)In the Polish Way, Zamoyski sets out to create a "reasonable synthesis" of Polish history from what he describes as the body of patronizing foreign works and defensively nationalistic Polish ones. He succeeds reasonably well in this goal. If he does lean at times toward nationalism in describing the "Polish Way" - religious tolerance, reliance on legal protections, respect for human rights - it can be excused because of his strictly factual approach and because of the important role the Zamoyski family played in much of the history he describes.
For me, though, there are two factors that make this such an excellent introductory history - one of the best one volume national histories I have read. First, the book skillfully weaves the history of ideas (primarily painting, music, architecture, literature and law) into the political and military narrative. I always found these sections both interesting and well integrated into the sweep of historical events. Second, the numerous maps, genealogies, photographs and other exhibits - including a Polish pronunciation guide - are invaluable to a reader, like me, with little or no prior knowledge of Polish history. I wish more authors and editors of so-called "popular histories" would pay as much attention to these important finishing touches.
True to his goal of producing a synthesis, Zamoyski describes the important themes in Polish history but stops short of providing analysis or conclusions. In describing changes in Poland's political system, he begs analysis of the eventual weakness of early Polish democracy in the absence of a "nation" based on ethnicity, religion, language or a common conception of a territorial homeland and of the strength of today's Poland partially, according to the author, because of its relative homogeneity.
This analysis would be important for a clear understanding of modern Poland and Europe (and other multi-ethnic, multi-lingual democracies). I plan to look for it in other books. The "Polish Way" does an excellent job at introducing the terrain.

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