Between east and west book

Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe by Anne Applebaum

By Anne Applebaum. New York: Pantheon Books. Applebaum, the deputy editor of The Spectator in London, achieves both specificity and readability. If she occasionally seems to undercut her own points, this only demonstrates that good travel books are by nature imperfect, since travel experiences do not always sustain a travel writer's own theories about a place. Precisely because these are borderlands okrainy in Russian, kresy in Polish where cultures overlap, many a truth can be undermined by another. Applebaum, for example, explores whether the renowned 19th-century poet Adam Mickiewicz was a Pole, a Belarussian, a Lithuanian or a Jew -- or any combination of the four. Enigma certainly reigns here.