I was a little skeptical of this book just because it is thirty years old at this point, but I found it well worth reading. Getting an up-close view of how the revolutionaries saw their movement in 1990 gives context for a lot of what we are seeing in Europe today. There are definitely moments that don't hold up particularly well--at one point Ash is quite dismissive of the possibility of a rise in nationalism in Eastern Europe, and yet here we are.

My edition of this book concludes with an epilogue written within the last year. Ash concludes that "The West’s mistake after 1989 was not that we celebrated what happened in Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest as a triumph of liberal, European, and Western values. It was all of that. Our mistake was to imagine that this was now the norm, the new normal, the way history was going." And I find that sadly hard to argue with.