This is a university-level textbook that covers Europe’s post-war history from 1945 till 2000 and is unique in its integrated treatment of Western and Eastern Europe throughout the period (not just in the post-1989 context). In 300-pages, Buchanan manages to distill many of the key political, economic, cultural, and social developments of the period and presents, in essence, a history of the construction of the post-war European West, and the role of Europe in the world. Summaries of important intellectual and cultural developments alongside the political and economic ones provide an interdisciplinary view. See in particular chapters 10, The Fall of the Communist Regimes: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1980–1991 and Chapter 11, Europe After the Cold War.