The Hoover Institution held a Book Talk with Timothy Garton Ash: Homelands: A Personal History of Europe on Tuesday, August 29, 2023 from 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM PT. 

This in-person-only event featured Condoleezza Rice, Michael McFaul, and Tobias Wolff in conversation with Timothy Garton Ash about his new book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. 

In Homelands, Timothy Garton Ash gives a unique account of the history of Europe since 1945, in which the United States has been a vital actor. This is history illustrated by memoir and reportage. Drawing on his extensive personal notes from 50 years of events witnessed, places visited and history makers encountered (from Margaret Thatcher to Vladimir Putin), Garton Ash charts the rise and then faltering of the quest for a 'Europe whole and free’. In this panel discussion, he was in conversation with two US scholar-practitioners who have played a significant part in that history, one of America's finest writers and a leading Stanford political scientist. 

Featuring

Timothy Garton Ash, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of European studies at Oxford University, is an internationally acclaimed contemporary historian. He is the author of ten previous books which have chronicled and analyzed the history of Europe over the last half-century. They include The Magic Lantern, his eyewitness account of the velvet revolutions of 1989, The File, his investigation of his own Stasi file, and In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent.

Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy. In addition, she is a founding partner of Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, an international strategic consulting firm.     

Michael McFaul is the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as a professor of political science, director and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He also currently works as a news analyst for NBC.  His areas of expertise include international relations, Russian politics, comparative democratization, and American foreign policy.

Tobias Wolff is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, Emeritus for Stanford University's Department of English in the School of Humanities and Sciences. A short story writer, memoirist, and novelist, Wolff is most known for his works This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army released in 1989 and 1994, respectively.

Moderated By 

Anna Grzymala-Busse is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor in the Department of Political Science, the director of the Europe Center, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford. Her research focuses on religion and politics, authoritarian political parties and their successors, and the historical development of the state.