In Europes Shadow Two Cold Wars and a ThirtyYear Journey Through Romania and Beyond
By Robert D. Kaplan

Robert Kaplan first visited Romania in the 1970s, when he was a young
journalist and the country was a bleak Communist backwater. It was one
of the darkest corners of Europe, but few Westerners were paying
attention. What ensued was a lifelong obsession with a critical, often
overlooked country a country that, today, is key to understanding the
current threat that Russia poses to Europe. In Europe s Shadow is
a vivid blend of memoir, travelogue, journalism, and history, a
masterly work thirty years in the making the story of a journalist
coming of age, and a country struggling to do the same. Through the lens
of one country, Kaplan examines larger questions of geography,
imperialism, the role of fate in international relations, the Cold War,
the Holocaust, and more. Here Kaplan illuminates the fusion of the
Latin West and the Greek East that created Romania, the country that
gave rise to Ion Antonescu, Hitler s chief foreign accomplice during
World War II, and the country that was home to the most brutal strain of
Communism under Nicolae Ceau escu. Romania past and present are
rendered in cinematic prose: the ashen faces of citizens waiting in
bread lines in Cold War era Bucharest; the B r gan Steppe, laid bare by
centuries of foreign invasion; the grim labor camps of the Black Sea
Canal; the majestic Gothic church spires of Transylvania and Maramure .
Kaplan finds himself in dialogue with the great thinkers of the past,
and with the Romanians of today, the philosophers, priests, and
politicians those who struggle to keep the flame of humanism alive in
the era of a resurgent Russia. Upon his return to Romania in 2013
and 2014, Kaplan found the country transformed yet again now a traveler s
destination shaped by Western tastes, yet still emerging from the long
shadows of Hitler and Stalin. In Europe s Shadow is the story of
an ideological and geographic frontier and the book you must read in
order to truly understand the crisis Europe faces, from Russia and from
within.