Carrying a lot of books while traveling becomes cumbersome especially when you aim to only have a hand carry with you to be able to skip baggage lines. With this in mind I loaded an e-book version of this book on my reader and went off for a week's vacation.

I am very glad to report that this book has been a treat to read on planes, trains, buses & in parks. So much so that the wife had to remind me about our vacation and the places we had planned to see. It is a very heavy book where the writer is traveling through the European continent to write about Europe's 100 years ending 2000. These 100 years are probably the most important because this is an immediately preceding century and resulted in two great wars which engulfed the entire continent and then the rest of the world. But the world wars were only the first half of century, rest is about the cold war, rise of communism in eastern half, fall of soviet empire, student protests, left wing movements, Balkan wars and lastly the rise of European union. Along the way, the writer has included stories of random people impacted by changes in their continent and also discussions with people involved in the affairs & happenings. His perspective & version of history is often debated but is interesting esp where De Gaulle is someone who is revered despite having done nothing for the French people in WW2, the complicity of ordinary citizen in Jewish prosecution by Nazis, the content of French for a large part of WW2 etc. Geert Mak is from Netherlands, a country we seldom hear about when talking about Europe in general thus it helped to read a bit about his country's involvement in European affairs.

For me an ultimate test of a book read on screen is if I find a need to have it in print for my collection because that means coughing up some money only to showcase it. I just ordered the print version of this book.