A Treasure Trove of Books on the Fall of Communism

Philip Zelikow, one-time director of the 911 Commission, is an expert on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. So he's the perfect choice to write a review article on a spate of books that came out in 2009, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is a very good article, and gives one some good insight into what each of these books has to offer.

You can use the links provided here to read Zelikow's article, which appeared in the November/December 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs, but I'm going to provide you with the names of the books he reviewed.

The Red Flag: A History of Communism. by David Priestland. Grove Press, 2009, 688 pp. $27.50.
The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989. Edited by Jeffrey A. Engel. Oxford University Press, 2009, 208 pp. $27.95.
There Is No Freedom Without Bread! 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism. By Constantine Pleshakov. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009, 304 pp. $26.00.
Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment. By Stephen Kotkin with a contribution by Jan T. Gross. Modern Library, 2009, 240 pp. $24.00.
The Rise and Fall of Communism. By Archie Brown. HarperCollins, 2009, 736 pp. $35.99.
Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire. By Victor Sebestyen. Pantheon Books, 2009, 480 pp. $30.00.
The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall. By Michael Meyer. Scribner, 2009, 272 pp. $26.00.
1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe. By Mary Elise Sarotte. Princeton University Press, 2009, 344 pp. $29.95.
Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War, and German Unification. By Frederic Bozo. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Berghahn Books, 2009, 417 pp. $110.00.

I might note that 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe is also reviewed by Andrew Moravscik in the "Western Europe" section of Recent Books on International Relations in the same issue of Foreign Affairs.