Rumania - Political Problems of an Agrarian State
Don't be put off by the title, the map is divine.
This book, written in 1951 by Henry Roberts, is, according to the Slavic Review:
a magisterial study of the interconnections of Rumanian economic and political life during the interwar period
From his obituary:
Roberts Henry Roberts (1916-1972) had studied at Yale to become a historian of Western Europe, but as a result of his wartime service in OSS he found himself in Rumania, immediately after the armistice of 1944, watching with torment…the disintegration, under Russia's shadow, of Rumanian society and politics. There was little that Henry could do about this chaotic drama and its eventual resolution, but it impelled him to write a book about the processes in Rumanian life between the two wars that had helped to bring it about.
It’s a somewhat dry academic work, not one I’d read by choice, the map though is a delight!
The cartographer
Jean Day Zallinger was born in Boston in 1918. She attend the Massachusetts College of Art and the Yale School of Fine Arts. Along with illustrating maps in books, she drew for Life magazine, Collier's Encyclopaedia, and numerous children's books.
Jean died in 2007.
You know what you’ve done now, I’m hooked on these posts.
Great post and map! I and my wife have been to Romania twice. The first time in the 1980's during the Ceaușescu regime. We stayed a week in Mamaia, close to Constanta which is shown in the map. That trip was truly awful. All prejudices about communism turned out to be true.
The second time was a few years ago. We were invited to a wedding in Bucharest of two of my colleagues in Brussels. While there, we went to Hanul Bran, (Dracula....), south-west of Brasov also shown in the map. This trip was truly wonderful.
During the second trip, I learned to be careful about the auto spelling feature in WhatsApp. While eating at a roadside side restaurant, I took a picture and what about to send it to my daughter indicating that we were in Transsylvania. WhatsApp decided to intervene and changed it to Transsexual.