Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the West (Random House, November 2004) is a "history of the present." At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the West has plunged into crisis. Europe tries to define itself in opposition to America; America increasingly regards Europe as troublesome and irrelevant; and Britain is split down the middle. What's to become of what used to be called "the free world"?
In Free World, Hoover senior fellow Timothy Garton Ash draws on an extraordinary range of sources: from unique, personal conversations with Bush, Blair, and Schröder to encounters with farmers in Kansas and British soldiers in rural England; from history, memoirs, opinion polls, and sociological research to personal observations based on a quarter- century of traveling in Europe and the United States. The result is a book that explains why Washington can never rule today's interconnected world alone, why the new enlarged Europe can realize its aspirations only in a larger, transatlantic community, and how the torments of the Middle East and the world's poor can be addressed only by free people working together.
No other contemporary thinker writes with the passion, historical insight, or reportorial brilliance of Timothy Garton Ash. Defying conventional wisdom and eschewing easy answers, this incisive book should be read not just by all those who purport to lead and inform us but by everyone who wishes to be a citizen of a free world.
Garton Ash, an internationally acclaimed contemporary historian whose focus is on Europe since 1945, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Garton Ash is in residence at Hoover on a part-year basis, while continuing his appointment as director of the European Studies Centre and Gerd Bucerius Senior Research Fellow in Contemporary History of St. Antony's College, Oxford University.
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Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the West
by Timothy Garton Ash
ISBN: 1-400-06219-5 $24.95 Hardcover
304 pages November 2004
