IN EUROPE

Geert Mak spent the year 1999 criss-crossing the continent, tracing thehistory of Europe from Verdun to Berlin, St Petersburg to Auschwitz, Kievto Srebrenica. He set off in search of evidence and witnesses, looking todefine the condition of Europe at the verge of a new millennium. Theresult is mesmerising: Mak's rare double talent as a sharp-eyed journalistand a hugely imaginative historian makes "In Europe" a dazzling account ofthat journey, full of diaries, newspaper reports and memoirs, and thevoices of prominent figures and unknown players; from the grandson ofKaiser Wilhelm II to Adriana Warno in Poland, with her holiday job at thegates of the camp at Birkenau.But Mak is above all an observer. Hedescribes what he sees at places that have become Europe's well-springs ofmemory, where history is written into the landscape. At Ypres he hears theblast of munitions from the Great War that are still detonated twice aday. In Warsaw he finds the point where the tram rails that led to theJewish ghetto come to a dead end in a city park. And in an abandonedcreche near Chernobyl, where tiny pairs of shoes still stand in neat rows,he is transported back to the moment time stood still in the dying days ofthe Soviet Union. Mak combines the larger story of twentieth-centuryEurope with details that suddenly give it a face, a taste and a smell. Hisunique approach makes the reader an eyewitness to his own half-forgottenpast, full of unknown peculiarities, sudden insights and touchingencounters. "In Europe" is a masterpiece; it reads like the epic novel ofthe continent's most extraordinary century.