Black Sea [Paperback]

Winner of theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize for History

In this study of the fateful encounters between Europe and Asia on the shores of a legendary sea, Neal Ascherson explores the disputed meaning of community, nationhood, history, and culture in a region famous for its dramatic conflicts. What makes the Back Sea cultures distinctive, Ascherson agrues, is the way their comonent parts came together over the millennia to shape unique communities, languages, religions, and trade. As he shows with skill and persuasiveness,Black Seapatterns in the Caucasus, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, and Greece have linked the peoples of Europe and Asia together for centuries.

Neal Ascherson, a leading British scholar-journalist, writes forThe Independentin London andThe New York Review of Books. He is the author ofPolish AugustandThe Struggle for Poland, among other books. He lives in London

A searching examination of the lands that ring the Black Sea and that were the scenes of some of the most ancient multicultural experiences of human history . . . rich both in historical data and in interpretation . . . with something to learn on every page. With ethnic conflicts much in the headlines, Mr. Ascherson's portrait of a place whose chief characteristic is the durability of its many ethnic identities comes at the right moment. Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

History and time and place flow together [in this] superb, encompassing story of the Black Sea region. Mary Lee Settle, Los Angeles Times

To say it at once: this is a superb book, beautifully written, evocative, learned, and deeply subtle. Timothy Garton Ash, The Times Literary Supplement

A beautifully written meditation on nationality, colonialism, nomadism and the settled life, which goes back to the beginning of the human world and traces the fortunes of the Aegean and Mediterranean traders who squeezedlÃ-