“The Baltic: A History” by Michael North [Book Review]

Michael North’s book “The Baltic: A History” is like trying to study a train through the window of another train flying in the opposite direction at 80 miles an hour. You can get the gist of the passing train’s composition, color, shape, and length but you would never recognize it sitting in a train yard amongst other trains because you never had much time to actually ‘study’ it. “The Baltic: A History” is metaphorically similar: it covers 11 countries over 2,000 years in only 329 pages – that’s a speeding bullet!

STAR RATINGS:

BALTIC: A HISTORY BOOK STATS:

• Published 2016
• 427 total pages
• 329 pages of text
• 10 chapters
• 1 Place Name Concordance
• 1 short Appendix section
• 1 Notes section
• 1 extensive References section
• 1 Index section
• Hardcover available

MIND BLOWN! COOL THINGS I LEARNED:

• Baltic tribes (Balts) were much more egalitarian than their Germanic counterparts
• For centuries trade is what has created contacts between the people surrounding the Baltic Sea
• Lithuania was always one step ahead of the demands of its competitors
• Property reforms played a major role in the development of this region
• The Danes and Swedes dominated much of the history of the western area of the Baltic
• The term “Baltic” comes from the Latin Balticum or Balticus meaning ‘belt’

BALTIC: A HISTORY BOOK REVIEW:

“The Baltic: A History” is not exactly an in-depth inquiry into the history of the Baltic region as one might expect from the title. Rather it is a gloss-over of nearly 2,000 years of events that have shaped the region, and when I use the term “events” it is to necessarily imply that they are devoid of any deeper contextual relationship that would qualify them as relevant to any historian. The chapters are basically annotated timelines.

This book receives 3 stars from me only because of its utility as a fairly comprehensive overview of the Baltic Region as a congruent entity. I can go to this one source to get a surface understanding of various undeveloped topics about a particular region of the Baltic that I may be interested in. For example, if I was interested in art in the Baltic region there are multiple mentions of how art in various locales were inspired and defined. What I won’t get is more than a surface mention of each, maybe 2 or 3 sentences per region.

The detraction of 2 stars from the total comes from the point of view of a reader who would like to learn specifics about a particular region of the Baltic through this book. Unfortunately, that is where this publication is lacking. As someone interested in the history of Lithuania, for example, there were cool tidbits mentioned throughout, but nothing completely substantive. What I did learn the most, and appreciated, was more on the history of Latvia and Estonia in relationship to Lithuania and the greater Baltic region.

This is a timeless paradox in publishing: space versus depth. Do you devote the X number of pages you can reasonably publish with as much depth as you can about a single topic, or do you stuff in as much binding material as you possibly can about a broad range of related sub-topics? If that supposition were transposed onto a scale (1 being space and 10 being depth) then this book is a 2.

This book’s high points are that is it seems like a fairly complete reference guide to the history of the Baltic region, that it systematically treats the Baltic region as a single entity based on its relationship to the Baltic Sea, and that it develops the narrative of the historical, legal, and economic interconnectivity of the peoples, languages, and geopolitical zones (countries) of the Baltic region. Of final utility is the author’s introduction which effectively ties the Baltic region together while at the same time explaining the various usages of the term itself across time and region; it’s a very nice piece. I would give the introduction a 10!

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

• North, Michael. 2016. The Baltic: A History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [translated by Kenneth Kronenberg].
• ISBN-13: 978-0674970830
• Amazon Link.