Destinations past

In Destination Past you will embark on a remarkable voyage in time as John Lukacs shares forty years of travels, ranging from his adoptive city of Philadelphia to his native Hungary to darkest Transylvania. With an unerring eye for detail and a keen ability to recreate the mood of a moment or the essence of an era, Lukacs blends travel and history in a sequence of unforgettable essays that will charm and enlighten. History comes alive out of the rubble in East Germany as an evening at the Dresden Opera revives the beauty of an earlier time. Steeped in boyhood memories and infused with the sights and scents of the annual Fete du Porc, "A Winter Feast in Hungary" evokes a powerful sense of tradition and family from an irrecoverable era. Historical figures provide the occasion for several essays. Lukacs's evocative description of Churchill's funeral defines the passing of an era. The commemoration of Franz Jagerstatter - the solitary opponent to National Socialism in the village of St. Radegund - is a perfect counterpoint to Hitler's one-hundredth birthday, an event that passes nearly unobserved in his nearby native city just forty miles away. You will share Lukacs's delight at the inspirations furnished by Cook's Continental Timetable, and you will be entranced by a touching view of Poland under Solidarity. Collected from such publications as the New Yorker, the New Republic, National Review, and the New York Times Magazine, these artful essays meld history and place in remarkable ways. "I am seventy now," writes Lukacs in his preface, "but I hope that God may still allow me a little more traveling, and perhaps even a brush with history, now and then." Readers of Destination Past are sure to hope for just the same thing.