meets Bill Bryson: a funny, fascinating, beautifully illustrated â and timely â history of countries that, for myriad and often ludicrous reasons, no longer exist.Prisoners of Geography
âCountries are just daft stories we tell each other. Theyâre all equally implausible once you get up closeâ
Countries die. Sometimes itâs murder, sometimes itâs by accident, and sometimes itâs because they were so ludicrous they didnât deserve to exist in the first place. Occasionally they explode violently. A few slip away almost unnoticed. Often the cause of death is either âgot too greedyâ or âNapoleon turned upâ. Now and then they just hold a referendum and vote themselves out of existence.
This is an atlas of nations that fell off the map. The polite way of writing an obituary is: dwell on the good bits, gloss over the embarrassing stuff. This book fails to do that. And that is mainly because most of these dead nations (and a lot of the ones that are still alive) are so weird or borderline nonsensical that itâs impossible to skip the embarrassing stuff.
The life stories of the sadly deceased involve a catalogue of chancers, racists, racist chancers, conmen, madmen, people trying to get out of paying tax, mistakes, lies, stupid schemes and General Idiocy. Because of this â and because treating nation states with too much respect is the entire problem with pretty much everything â these accounts are not fussed about adding to all the earnest flag saluting in the world, however nice some of the flags are.