Volume 43, Number 7 · April 18, 1996
On the Barbary Shore
By Norman Davies
Black Sea
by Neal Ascherson
Hill and Wang, 306 pp., $23.00
The Black Sea is Eastern Europe's counterpart to the Mediterranean. Indeed, it is an extension of the Mediterranean, joined to its larger twin at the Bosporus. Together, like America's Great Lakes, they form a magnificent complex of navigable waters, set in a sun-drenched climate and surrounded since the earliest times by one civilization after another. The Black Sea littoral was dominated for very long periods by ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, and most recently, and in part, by Russia. The great rivers that flow into it—the Danube, the Dnieper, the Kuban, the Dniester, and the Don—drain a region that stretches from the Black Forest in Germany to the Caucasus.
Review, 4703 words
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