Synopses & Reviews
The Grooves of Change is the culmination of J. F. Brown’s esteemed career as an analyst of Eastern Europe. He traces events in this diverse and disruption-riddled region from the communist era to the years of transition after the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present. Brown also provides specific analyses of the development of liberal democratic culture in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe—Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the successor states of Yugoslavia.
While acknowledging that the term “Eastern Europe” began to fall into disuse with the end of the cold war, Brown uses it as a framework for discussing the enduring features of the modern history of this region: its basic continuity, the prominence of ethnic and national factors, and its dependence on great powers or combinations of powers outside it. He explains the significance of the growing gulf between East Central Europe and South Eastern Europe, the overall political and economic deprivation and its effect on the people, the urgency of change, and the complex dynamics within Eastern Europe that have defied definitions and generalization. Finally, Brown points to the need for continuing assistance by the United States and the West and suggests what the twenty-first century may bring to this constantly changing part of the world.
Those seeking a clear overview of events in Eastern Europe during the recent psat and the state of these nations now will benefit from this incisive study by J. F. Brown.
Review
“J. F. Brown’s The Grooves of Change is a lucid, well-written overview of developments in Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. In addition to its sweeping scope, it illuminates the minority problems that have plagued Eastern Europe and have played such an important—and often disruptive—role in East European politics.”—F. Stephen Larrabee, RAND
Review
“I read this very fine book with pleasure and profit. Let us hope this is not, as he insists, Brown’s last book on Eastern Europe. Both lively and wise, it is a distillation of a lifetime of insights from one of the most brilliant observers of East Central Europe.”—Robert Hutchings, Princeton University
Synopsis
Eastern Europe ten years after the Cold War.
About the Author
J. F. Brown has been a Visiting Professor at Columbia University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; and American University in Bulgaria. His numerous books include Eastern Europe and Communist Rule, Surge to Freedom, and Hopes and Shadows, all published by Duke University Press.