Is there really a new Europe? Have the extraordinary transformations of the last half century - the rise and fall of the Eastern Bloc, Germany's reunification, ethnic warfare, even the ongoing creation of a common parliament and currency - rendered our culture not only unrecognizable but unimaginable?

These are among the myriad questions posed by Jan Morris in Fifty Years of Europe. Morris, one of our era's most engaging historians and celebrated travelers, revisits the continent she's long known so well and tries to discover whether she now knows it at all. How she contrasts her European experiences today with those of two generations past makes for an insightful and highly personal study.