Walking Since Daybreak - Softcover

Eksteins, Modris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1552631885 ISBN 13: 9781552631881

Publisher: Key Porter Books, 2000

Synopsis

Winner of the Pearson Writer`s Trust Award for Non-Fiction. Part history and part autobiography, Walking Since Daybreak tells the tragic story of the Baltic nations before, during and after World War II. The immense cataclysm of World War II has no precedent in human history: 28 million Russians died, 10 million Germans, 6 million Jews and several hundred thousand French, English, Americans and Canadians. The Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, briefly independent between the wars, were devastated and many of their inhabitants scattered to the ends of the earth. As Eksteins` parallel narrative approaches its startling climax, the reader learns yet again that in historical catastrophes blame and praise are nearly impossible to assign. Walking Since Daybreak belongs in the great tradition of books that redefine our understanding of history, like J. R. Huizinga`s The Waning of the Middle Ages and Jacob Burckhardt`s The Renaissance in Italy. James Carroll declared Eksteins` previous book, Rites of Spring, "the start of a new history." Walking Since Daybreak brings this history to its zenith.

About this title

Review:

For thousands of years, the windswept plains of the eastern Baltic attracted migrant tribes from all over Eurasia. These peoples lived together, sometimes uneasily, sometimes at peace, forging the multiethnic cultures of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. The last two centuries have brought one army after another to the Baltic, led by Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas, Hitler's generals, and Stalin's field marshals. In the wake of World War II, the multiethnic cultures of the Baltic splintered, and millions of citizens, including Canadian historian Modris Eksteins, born in Latvia in 1943, were sent into flight.

Eksteins's narrative, haunted by ghosts and unconventional in structure, embraces many stories. At one level, he offers a requiem for the Baltic past. At another, he composes a personal history of his family, driven so far from its homeland. At yet another, he ponders the nature of history itself in a tale that "must reflect the loss of authority, of history as ideal and of the author-historian as agent of that ideal. What we are left with is the intimacy not of truth but of experience." The terrible experience of war and conflagration propels his beautifully rendered, eyes-wide-open narrative. During his childhood, Eksteins concludes, "for regret and tears there was no time, no point." Half a century later, he is able to mourn the loss of the old Baltic world--and readers of contemporary history will find much to think about as he does. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

Modris Ekstein is a professor of history at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus.

About this edition

• Publisher: Key Porter Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1552631885
• ISBN 13: 9781552631881
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 258