A city not so well known in the Anglophone world, but deserving of much more attention. The subtitle says it all: ‘A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe’. An epoch of grandeur inevitably ended in catastrophe: the golden age of the 15th century was crushed by the Ottoman Sultan and the conversion of the royal place in Budapest into horse stalls and an arsenal; the reform age of Budapest ended bloody in defeat by the Austrians in 1849; and the modern golden age of Budapest at the beginning of the 20th century, when it became a grand European metropolis, crashed in the disaster of the First World War and the dismemberment of Hungary; Fascism and forty years of Soviet-style Communism followed, until we reach the 21st century in which Budapest is trying to find its place. Joe’s book is made more vivid by the stories of people whose lives show what grandeur and catastrophe really meant: the affluent upper middle class Jewish family in the early 1900s whose life vanished in the Fascist terror in the mid- 1940s; the river forces officer whose social pedigree lead to him and his family being persecuted by the Communist authorities, banned from residing in Budapest and exiled to live under the most primitive conditions in the depths of the Hungarian puszta; the colourful life of the political dissident who became mayor of Budapest after the collapse of communism; the young entrepreneur who has seen his chance and has taken it to build-up a most novel thriving business in the Budapest of today. Never have the light and shade of a city’s past and present been told so vividly and interwoven with a narrative of the fate of its people.
