The Magic Lantern is one of those rare books that define a historic moment, written by a brilliant witness who was also a participant in epochal events. Whether covering Poland’s first free parliamentary elections—in which Solidarity found itself in the position of trying to limit the scope of its victory—or sitting in at the meetings of an unlikely coalition of bohemian intellectuals and Catholic clerics orchestrating the liberation of Czechoslovakia, Garton Ash writes with enormous sympathy and power.

This book is a stunningly evocative portrait of the revolutions that swept Communism from Eastern Europe in 1989 and whose aftereffects are still being felt today. As Garton Ash writes in an incisive new afterword, from the perspective of three decades later: “Freedom’s battle is never finally won. It must be fought anew in every generation.”
Witness and History

Warsaw: The First Election

Budapest: The Last Funeral

Berlin: Wall's End

Prague: Inside the Magic Lantern

The Year of Truth

Afterword to the Vintage Edition: 
“Thirty Years On—Time for a New Liberation?”
Timothy Garton Ash is a fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Celebrated for his essays in the New York Review of Books, he is the author of The Polish Revolution, which won the Somerset Maugham Award; The Uses of Adversity, which won the Prix Européen de l’Essai; Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World; and The Magic Lantern, his eyewitness account of the Central European revolutions of 1989, which has been translated into 14 languages. He lives in Oxford with his wife and two sons. View titles by Timothy Garton Ash

About

The Magic Lantern is one of those rare books that define a historic moment, written by a brilliant witness who was also a participant in epochal events. Whether covering Poland’s first free parliamentary elections—in which Solidarity found itself in the position of trying to limit the scope of its victory—or sitting in at the meetings of an unlikely coalition of bohemian intellectuals and Catholic clerics orchestrating the liberation of Czechoslovakia, Garton Ash writes with enormous sympathy and power.

This book is a stunningly evocative portrait of the revolutions that swept Communism from Eastern Europe in 1989 and whose aftereffects are still being felt today. As Garton Ash writes in an incisive new afterword, from the perspective of three decades later: “Freedom’s battle is never finally won. It must be fought anew in every generation.”

Table of Contents

Witness and History

Warsaw: The First Election

Budapest: The Last Funeral

Berlin: Wall's End

Prague: Inside the Magic Lantern

The Year of Truth

Afterword to the Vintage Edition: 
“Thirty Years On—Time for a New Liberation?”

Author

Timothy Garton Ash is a fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Celebrated for his essays in the New York Review of Books, he is the author of The Polish Revolution, which won the Somerset Maugham Award; The Uses of Adversity, which won the Prix Européen de l’Essai; Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World; and The Magic Lantern, his eyewitness account of the Central European revolutions of 1989, which has been translated into 14 languages. He lives in Oxford with his wife and two sons. View titles by Timothy Garton Ash

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