PAUL HOCKENOS reviewed Mary Elise Sarotte’s book 1989 – The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe in "The Year That Was," The New York Times, January 22, 2010. "
"Europe’s geopolitical map, just 20 years after the breach of the Berlin Wall, looks like a foregone conclusion today — the natural upshot of Communism’s demise and the spread of liberal democracy. The Central Europeans are snugly in the European Union; NATO presides over a largely peaceful continent; and though spats between the West and an authoritarian Russia occasionally flare, this is surely understandable given all the givens. But this order of things was hardly inevitable, as Mary Elise Sarotte, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, reminds us in “1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe.”