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Kevin O'Connor. The History of the Baltic States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003 (The Greenwood Histories of the Modem Nations), ISBN 0313323550.

Writing more than 35 years ago, Georg von Rauch had to justify why he decided to include Lithuania in his path-breaking book on the history of the independent Baltic States. Hopefully, it is no longer necessary today to stress the merits of comparative work on the history of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Yet, remarkably, Kevin O'Connor's book is actually the very first general history of the Baltic nations in English (leaving aside the barely readable collective effort by Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian historians published simultaneously in several languages in 1999 as The History of the Baltic Countries). There are several fine monographs on the individual countries, but surprisingly no one has yet attempted a comparative general history of the three countries. Von Rauch and later Romauld Misiunas and Rein Taagepera pioneered the writing of comparative Baltic history, but their work covered distinct periods of only a few decades. Thus, O'Connor should be applauded for having the courage to seize the opportunity to meet an obvious need. Alhough the book is a chronological narrative from the earliest times to the present, the Greenwood series emphasizes modem developments . Thus more than half of the volume is devoted to the twentieth century and only a scant twenty pages are spent on the entire period prior to the eighteenth century . The book is divided into the following chapters: a general introduction to the geography and peoples of "unknown Europe"; "early history" including everything up to the end of the Great Northern War in 1721; imperial Russian rule until the beginning of the twentieth century; "The Revolutionary Era, 1905-1920" during which the Baltic nations achieved statehood; the independence era between the two World Wars; "Soviet rule" which also deals with the Nazi German occupation; "Reawakening" tracing how the Balts successfully used Gorbachev 's policies of Glasnost' and Perestroika to construct an exit from the USSR; and finally, the "post-Soviet" period covering political, social and economic developments as well as relations with the East and West. The book also contains a useful chronology, some maps (a list of maps would