Published in time for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the book's subject of inquiry, this amalgamation of articles about the revolutions of 1989 offers a snapshot of outdated consensuses, wherein genuinely interesting details are bogged down by sweeping assertions and missing information. Differentiating itself from edited volumes about 1989 that focus on general summaries of the year's events, such as Vladimir Tismăneanu's The Revolutions of 1989 (London, 1999), Wolfgang Mueller, Michael Gehler, and Arnold Suppan's book opts instead for a country-specific approach. Aiming to provide “an overview of the various national revolutions” using “both domestic and international perspectives” (6), the book's first section, “Revolutions,” devotes a separate chapter for each country that experienced popular movements and regime-shaking events in 1989—not only in Europe, but also China. The second section, “Reactions,” begins with a general overview of the two global superpowers in 1989 before delving similarly into chapters dedicated to the attitudes of specific countries. The third section, “Aftermath,” provides two country-specific chapters, two general summaries of “societal transformations” and “epochal changes” after 1989, and two articles about the enlargement of NATO and the European Union. As Mueller mentions in his introduction, this book “is not concerned with postcommunist transition” (6), an admission made evident by the comparatively paltry representation of individual countries in the “Aftermath” section.

Though the book enjoys some advantages over similar works as a result of its focus on individual countries, gross inaccuracies and outdated interpretations of what happened in those countries seriously hamper the quality of several of its chapters. The list of errors is troublingly long, with several notable examples. Hans-Hermann Hertle claims in his article on the German Democratic Republic (DDR) that the ruling regime had “for over forty years … been confronted by the expectations of large portions of the populations for democracy and prosperity based on the West German model, as well as by their orientation towards a unified Germany” (117), even though there was no long-term popular movement for German reunification during most of the existence of the DDR, including the first months of the revolution in 1989. Jiří Suk makes the common (but incorrect) assumption that the Czech and Slovak republics were dominated, respectively, by Civic Forum and Public Against Violence throughout the revolution, but the relationship between the two groups and the population of Czechoslovakia was far more nuanced. Writing about Romania, Anneli Ute Gabanyi asserts that factors behind the country's “fundamental rejection of Marxist-Leninist ideology” and “mistrust of the Soviet Union” include Romania being “the only country of the former Soviet bloc where a Romanic [sic] language is spoken and whose culture is closely connected to the culture of Western Europe” (200), a wildly unsubstantiated claim that ignores the complexities of Romania's relationship with socialist ideology, the history of Communism in other Romance-language countries across the globe, and the cultural connection between other Soviet Bloc countries and “Western Europe” all at once.

Equally troubling is the lack of information and narrowness of scope in many articles within the collection. The “Reactions” section of the book contains few actual international reactions to the revolutions of 1989, focusing instead on German reunification and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This silence toward the majority of countries that experienced revolutionary and regime-changing events in 1989 is difficult to excuse, particularly considering the editors’ commitment to providing a chapter for every country in the first section. The “Aftermath” section does not fare much better. Though Liliana Deyanova's article on the public memory of 1989 in Bulgaria and Mikhail Prozumenshchikov's narrative of the “archival revolution” in the Soviet Union are both interesting, the latter is out of place as the sole article representing the history of the Soviet Union during the period of its dissolution. Despite Mueller's introductory warning that the post-1989 period was not the focus of the book, more information about other countries in Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of post-Soviet successor states would have been welcome here.

These criticisms are not to say that the contributions to this book are unilaterally misinformed. Karsten Brüggemann narrates a nuanced history of the “Singing Revolution” in the Baltic republics, Norman Naimark contributes a compelling chapter on superpower reactions to 1989 and the complexities of “what it really meant to be a superpower in the late Cold War world” (253), and Péter Vámos's comparative article interestingly addresses the interplay between the Soviet Bloc countries and China during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. But despite some examples of particularly strong contributions, the problematic arguments in many chapters and inconsistencies in the scope of the articles chosen for inclusion render this book difficult to recommend to anyone but the most ardent collectors of literature related to 1989. Established scholars in the field will likely be already familiar with many of the book's contributors and may be put off by much of what they read within its pages. Scholars new to the topic may find the detailed chronology at the end of the book useful, but the preponderance of incorrect information in the articles prevents the book from serving as a proper introduction to the topic. Finally, professors seeking a general textbook about the revolutions of 1989 to assign a classroom or seminar on the topic will likely find more success simply compiling their own alternative reading lists. Charles Maier and James Krapfl are both cited within this book in reference to historiography on the revolutions of 1989 in the DDR and Czechoslovakia, respectively, and both historians have worked to dispel some of the assumptions about those countries that were unfortunately repeated here, making them excellent names to begin with for those interested in more nuanced works about these two countries.