Dissolution

Fewer than ten years ago, a great wall divided Eastern and Western Europe. When it came crashing down in Germany in 1989, Charles S. Maier writes, the residents of the East suddenly found the rules that had governed their lives utterly changed. It could not have been otherwise, for the old rules were no good in "a society breaking down, a regime out of touch with its society." Maier pokes into the nooks and crannies of recent history, showing how earthshaking changes can overtake us all unawares, and he traces the course of Communism's fall through a series of complex causes that can ultimately be ascribed to the usual human weaknesses: greed, ambition, corruption. His is an absorbing book that treats history as a sometimes puzzling morality play.