Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century--and After

There could be more overview and less detail and this book would not have suffered for it.

Now the downside: all of this detail makes the book terribly long. The prose, particularly in early sections, is unnecessarily verbose and not particularly well-constructed. I am quite comfortable reading academic texts; this one could be better. Teachers using this text should include some sort of geography primer; I think that even if Americans were geographically compotent, we would need help with some of these references to non-political regional names. I do not consider this a weakness, however, and generally endorse this text; my course used several of these chronologies, and this was easily the best. If your students will read 500+ pages of rather obscure text, Crampton will serve you very well.