In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond

From the New York Times bestselling author Robert D. Kaplan, named one of the world’s Top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, comes a riveting journey through one of Europe’s frontier  countries—and a potent examination of the forces that will determine  Europe’s fate in the postmodern age.

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  Ceaușescu. Romania past and present are rendered in cinematic prose: the  ashen faces of citizens waiting in bread lines in Cold War–era  Bucharest; the Bărăgan 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 Maramureş. 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.