Romania (Reaktion Books - Topographics)

Book Description
Romania occupies a unique position on the map of Eastern Europe. It is a country that presents many paradoxes. In this book the preeminent Romanian historian Lucian Boia examines his native land's development from the Middle Ages to modern times, delineating its culture, history, language, politics and ethnic identity. Boia introduces us to the heroes and myths of Romanian history, and provides an enlightening account of the history of Romanian Communism. He shows how modernization and the influence of the West have divided the nation - town versus country, nationalists versus pro-European factions, the elite versus the masses - and argues that Romania today is in chronic difficulty as it tries to fix its identity and envision a future for itself.

The book concludes with a tour of Bucharest, whose houses, streets and public monuments embody Romania's traditional values and contemporary contradictions.


About the Author
Lucian Boia is Professor of History at the University of Bucharest. He is the author of Great Historians of the Modern Age (1991) and La Fin du monde: une histoire sans fin (1999).


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Romania occupies a unique position on the borderland of Europe. In this book, the Romanian writer Lucian Boia surveys the history of his native land from the Roman period to modern times, illuminating its complex culture and tumultuous history, and the diversity of its inter-ethnic relations - sometimes conflictual but always enriching. From Count Dracula and Queen Marie to Mircea Eliade and Nicolae Ceausescu, Boia introduces us to Romania's real and imagined heroes and villains, providing among other things an enlightening account of the Communist era. He shows how the disruptions produced by Communism further held back a country whose historical late-coming had only partly been compensated for by the modernization programme upon which it had embarked in the nineteenth century. Boia argues that Romania today is a land of strong contrasts where striking difference exist between the elite and the rest of the population, and where the match is still being played out between nationalists and partisans of integration in Europe - a country still trying to fix a contemporary identity and envision a viable future for itself. His occasionally humorous, always affectionate text concludes with a tour of the capital city of Bucharest, whose apartment blocks, places, boulevards and public monuments embody Romania's traditional values and contemporary contradictions.


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