Outstanding Academic Titles 2025: Central and Eastern Europe

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to Central and Eastern Europe

Posted on February 6, 2026 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2025 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on Central and Eastern Europe. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Battleground Ukraine: from independence to the war with Russia
Karatnycky, Adrian. Yale, 2024

This timely and uniquely insightful book by Karatnycky, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the former CEO of Freedom House, draws on the author’s decades of involvement with Ukraine, including his analysis as a journalist. The book covers the history of Ukraine since independence in 1991, a key theme being the eventual establishment of a unified nation. The chapters advance chronologically by president, each ending with that president’s legacy—there are separate chapters on current President Zelensky in his first two years and as a wartime president. This chapter division is logical given that the president is the most important political actor in Ukraine, and even more so because Ukrainian presidents have differed sharply in terms of political orientation and success. More broadly, the author discusses a full range of key individuals, often referencing direct personal conversations. Precise data and useful photographs are employed throughout, and an annotated list of various sources and additional readings provides more context. This clearly written book fulfills a dual role, both essential and very informative for academics and also perfectly accessible to the general reader—e.g., the references are minimal and do not involve numbered endnotes. View on Amazon

2. The question of unworthy life: eugenics and Germany’s twentieth century
Herzog, Dagmar. Princeton, 2024

This is an outstanding history of eugenic politics in modern Germany. Grounded in deep learning, the book illustrates how, beginning in the 19th century, German leaders in medicine, pedagogy, and religion paved the way intellectually and politically for Nazi efforts to sterilize or kill disabled people who were deemed “unworthy of living” (p. 152). Herzog (the Graduate Center, CUNY) also traces the tenacious hold of prejudice, fear, discrimination, and cruelty toward the disabled in postwar West and East Germany. While the defeat of Nazism ended the mass murder of the disabled, eugenic notions regarding the origins of disability and the hierarchical valuation of human life based on whether an individual was “educable” (p. 7) or capable of “productive” work (p. 70) remained deeply embedded in German intellectual, social, and political culture. The story Herzog tells of reformers’ struggles against such attitudes in fields like psychiatry and pedagogy, as well as in the political and public realms, is riveting and inspiring. Finally, Herzog shows how, in recent decades, the disabled have achieved long-sought recognition of their historical persecution, improved treatment, and, closely connected to the latter, greater social equality and inclusion.  View on Amazon

3. Germany through Jewish eyes: a history from the eighteenth century to the present
Volkov, Shulamit. Cambridge, 2024

In this erudite work, Volkov (emer., Tel Aviv Univ., Israel) invites readers to reconsider the contours of modern German history as seen “through Jewish eyes.” Spanning the Enlightenment to the present, the book’s 12 chronological chapters explore how Jews observed, participated in, and interpreted the German past, from promises of inclusion to the traumas of persecution and return. Volkov foregrounds the ambivalence, asymmetry, and perception that shaped Jewish life in Germany, offering not a separate Jewish history but a reframed German one. Particularly striking are Volkov’s chapters on Weimar and Nazism, which blend intellectual history with lived experience. Drawing on figures from Peter Gay to Käte Frankenthal, she humanizes the descent into exclusion, capturing the accelerating brutality of the 1930s through silence and everyday estrangement. Drawing on decades of scholarship, the book offers a pluralized Jewish perspective that illuminates tensions between liberalism and exclusion, integration and marginalization. Especially valuable for students and lay readers are Volkov’s final reflections on postwar memory, anti-Semitism, and the renewed fragility of Jewish belonging in contemporary Germany. A landmark contribution to German-Jewish historiography, Germany through Jewish Eyes should be required reading in any course on historical memory or German, Jewish, or European history. View on Amazon

4. Remembering the war, forgetting the terror: appeals to family memory in Putin’s Russia
Haskins, Ekaterina V. Pennsylvania State, 2024

The Great Patriotic War (1941–45) left a lasting impression in all Russians’ memories, regardless of age or walk of life. For those in the West unfamiliar with the pain and suffering of the Stalinist years, this may be difficult to fathom. In this volume, Haskins (Pennsylvania State Univ.) examines the evolution of how this period became embedded in the Russian consciousness, analyzing the Russo-German War and how the victims of Stalin’s criminality are remembered in Russian cinema and television. She notes how cinematic artists have sought to blend stories of those who fought for the Motherland against the fascist aggressors despite the pain and suffering they endured under Stalin’s regime. Her explanations of the miniseries The Penal Battalion (2004) and the film The Dawns Here Are Quiet (2015) highlight how the war’s massive human sacrifice contributed to Russian patriotism long after the Soviet Union’s collapse. The official memories of the Great Patriotic War are still employed as part of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to rekindle Russian nationalism, even while his regime seeks to repress memories of Stalin’s purges and cruelty. Remembering the War, Forgetting the Terror is a necessary volume for all academic libraries to acquire. View on Amazon.

5. Between borders: the great Jewish migration from Eastern Europe
Brinkmann, Tobias. Oxford, 2024

In this pathbreaking study, based on vast archival and scholarly research, Brinkmann (Pennsylvania State Univ.), a prolific historian of Jewish migration history, depicts in detail a historic 80-year period of population movement and digs deeply into several of its key dimensions—e.g., the logistics of movement, the institutions involved, the participants and professional analysts who sought to define this phenomenon, and the larger international context in which millions of Jews left their homelands and resettled elsewhere between the 1860s and the end of WW II. Addressing the long-standing debate in Jewish historiography over whether these individuals were refugees or migrants—i.e., people continually fleeing persecution or immigrants seeking a better life—Brinkmann occupies the middle ground, acknowledging the “growing insecurity and fear” that also lurked behind those primarily seeking “better economic opportunities” (p. 244). Additionally, dismissing the “fraught thesis that Jews had a ‘proclivity’ to migrate”—a dangerous stereotype—Brinkmann urges readers to investigate “other ethnoreligious groups [that have] pursued similar strategies” in the modern era (p. 246). With its helpful maps, evocative illustrations, copious notes, and extensive bibliography, this dense monograph encourages similarly ambitious investigations of the contemporary politics of global immigration. View on Amazon.

Read more about Choice Outstanding Academic Titles.

Enjoying our reviews? Academic librarians may sign up for a complimentary trial of Choice Reviews for their institution.

*Trial limited to academic institutions that have not had a trial/subscription to Choice Reviews in the past 24 months. The offer is limited to institutional trials only, not available to individuals/publishers.

Read previously published Outstanding Academic Title list snippets.

Related Posts