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The Year that Changed the World
Michael Meyer
The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Scribner
September 2009
On Sale: September 8, 2009
272 pages
ISBN: 1416558454
EAN: 9781416558453
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
ON THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FALL OF THE BERLIN
WALL, MICHAEL MEYER PROVIDES A RIVETING EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT
OF THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM IN EASTERN EUROPE THAT
BRILLIANTLY REWRITES OUR CONVENTIONAL UNDERSTANDING OF HOW
THE COLD WAR CAME TO AN END AND HOLDS IMPORTANT LESSONS FOR
AMERICA'S CURRENT GEOPOLITICAL CHALLENGES. " Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" President Ronald
Reagan's famous exhortation when visiting Berlin in 1987
has long been widely cited as the clarion call that brought
the Cold War to an end. The United States won, so this
version of history goes, because Ronald Reagan stood firm
against the USSR; American resoluteness brought the evil
empire to its knees. Michael Meyer, who was there at the time as a Newsweek
bureau chief, begs to differ. In this extraordinarily compelling account of the
revolutions that roiled Eastern Europe in 1989, he shows
that American intransigence was only one of many factors
that provoked world-shaking change. Meyer draws together
breathtakingly vivid, on-the-ground accounts of the rise of
the Solidarity movement in Poland, the stealth opening of
the Hungarian border, the Velvet Revolution in Prague and
the collapse of the infamous wall in Berlin. But the most
important events, Meyer contends, occurred secretly, in the
heroic stands taken by individuals in the thick of the
struggle, leaders such as poet and playwright Vaclav Havel
in Prague; the Baltic shipwright Lech Walesa; the quietly
determined reform prime minister in Budapest, Miklos
Nemeth; and the man who privately realized that his empire
was already lost, and decided -- with courage and
intelligence -- to let it go in peace,Soviet general
secretary of the communist party, Mikhail Gorbachev. Reporting for Newsweek from the frontlines in Eastern
Europe, Meyer spoke to these players and countless others.
Alongside their deliberate interventions were also the
happenstance and human error of history that are always
present when events accelerate to breakneck speed. Meyer
captures these heady days in all of their rich drama and
unpredictability. In doing so he provides not just a
thrilling chronicle of the most important year of the
twentieth century but also a crucial refutation of American
political mythology and a triumphal misunderstanding of
history that seduced the United States into many of the
intractable conflicts it faces today. The Year That Changed
the World will change not only how we see the past, but
also our understanding of America's future.
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