title: Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (Eastern European Literature)
author: Patrik Ourednk
description: Juxtaposing East and West and blurring Barbie and Buchenwald, Ourednik's stream of historical consciousness shreds familiar narrative trajectories and compresses 100 years of still-fresh history into a roughly equivalent number of pages. The result is a self-consciously absurd melange of grandiose vision, junk science, and casually quantified atrocity, an autistic narration of sociological fact with the barest sense of moral gravity. It is a reminder of how horrifying and inscrutable the past century has been. But, like many modernist works pursuing perspective through distortion, this one is helped along considerably by its wit. Czech-born Ourednik has spent the last 20 years in France, and his existentialist bent fits surprisingly well with his linguistic playfulness and his Communist-era gallows humor. The author's professed affinity for Vonnegut and Flaubert is evident, and fans of those authors may particularly enjoy this book's wry cry for a more humane twenty-first century. Pithy, occasionally poignant, and not just for Europeanists. <i>Brendan Driscoll</i><br><i>Copyright &#169; American Library Association. All rights reserved</i>
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  **Europe: A Cultural History**
  
  From the beginnings of agricultural society in Africa and the eastern
  Mediterranean seventeen centuries before Christ up to late twentieth-century
  mass culture, Rietbergen describes Europe’s colourful cultural history in
  terms of continuity and change as societies developed new ways of surviving,
  believing, looking at man and the world, and of consuming and communicating.
  He examines culture through the media of literature, art, science, technology
  and music.
  
  A major and original contribution to studies of the idea of Europe, this book
  is distinctive in paying particular attention to the impact of other cultures
  on Europe and the interaction between Europe and ‘other worlds’. Looking
  beyond ancient and renaissance European cultural history, the author also
  covers the more recent cultural changes of the last two centuries.
  
  A wide selection of excerpts support and enliven the arguments. From the
  ancient Babylonian law codes t