In Europe

Mak spent 1999 criss-crossing the Continent in a camper van, sending dispatches to the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad. These reports, collected here, create a journey through the last century, with Mak breaking up what is essentially traditional, narrative history with short, contemporary portraits of historical settings. For example, Mak settles down to write about World War I from a farm in Ypres, he tells us about Hitler's disastrous Russian invasion from a square in Volgograd, and he recounts the splintering of Yugoslavia from a restaurant in Novi Sad.