Rating: 
Summary: Travel writing at its best
Review: I read a review of this book in The New Yorker, and being interested in German history, I bought it. This is a special book, and the Amazon.com reviewer has this all wrong. Heavy on narrative and light on history? The reverse is what ordinarily kills books like this: this writer, through his narrative skills, brings the history alive; he doesn'r kill it through an overdose of fact. I was most interested in learning the distinction between being a Prussian and being a Nazi, something I'll bet most people miss. A great book.
Rating:
Summary: Overall, just a great book
Review: If you are interested in the Topic of Prussia, from it's early History, to it's Final, most Terrible finale; this is the book that you must read. It starts out from the very begining when the place we now call Prussia was just an empty barren landscape. The author takes us to the places where all the great cities and battles of the time took place, and tells us how Prussia looks at the time the book was written, about 3 years ago. He interviews the people who reside now as well. Sure, as some would say there is slander in his tone towards them but if you think of the overall picture maybe he s trying to tell us something about that. Form your own Opinion. What really puts this book over the top into the Five Star realm is the last 3 chapters when he talks about the Thrid Reich. Specially about the "Trek" that most Prussians had to take in order to get away from the Russians. The tales of the misery, death and suffering is told by interviews from people who went through it. The assasination of Hitler is talked about and a very interesting read as well. There is even a very large interview with a Holocaust survivor that shows the darker side of the Thrid Reich. Over all a great book and a must read if you want to know about Prussia. In fact it should be the only book you should get if you want to get a good, somewhat detailed overview of that old land where now no Germans reside. Simply a complete book with lots of interviews which in turn, as any reader would know, gets you straight to the point of the theme, without much imagination or thougth on your part.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent history of Prussion
Review: Mr. Roy has written a splendid history of East Prussia. I highly recommend it for readers interested in European history. Much of his book is concerned the 20th century and the effects of two world wars. This left me somewhat frustrated and I wish the author had included more Prussian history from before 1800. The book would also benefit from more detailed maps. Despite these minor criticisms, I was very pleased with Mr. Roy's perceptive interviews and travelogue, and very impressed with his depth of knowledge. This book is well organized and annotated, and it treats Prussia's complex minorities with equality and sensitivity. It ends on a rather depressing note, and I was discouraged to learn that her neighbors seem prepared to repeat past mistakes and transgressions.
Rating:
Summary: East Prussian American Looks Back and Forward
Review: My great grandmother came from near Danzig. Her name was Tarnowski, and obviously had Slavic origins. Her husband, a Proesch from Mecklenburg, was a descendant of the Slavic Abotrite tribes (ca. 800). They both considered themselves German. This book explained to me the ethic confusion of areas like Poland/Prussia. It also highlighted a fact that history has witnessed with Poland: You can wipe it off the map politically, but a Polish/Prussian sensibility will remain. What can this mean for the future? I believe Prussia is, indeed, not dead. Also, that WWIII is not neccesarily the inevitible result of such a conflict. Is the extinction of Prussia another Versailles-like offense to the German people, or can accommodation be made to deflate this "ethnic" horror? I welcome response.
Rating:
Summary: Very Enlightening
Review: Not only does this book explore Prussia (primarily East Prussia)from the earliest years it gives the Westerner an enlightenment about the terrible cruelty that was visited upon all peoples of this area from the earliest time until Stalin's reign. We Westerner's think WWII was cruel, but this is nothing compared to what Hitler and Stalin visited upon these peoples of all creeds. The Jews were especially hard hit with the millions upon millions if deaths, but they don't come away perfect either. The book also discussed the Polish racism against the Jews and Germans which I had never known. By reading this book you can begin to fanthom and understand the Jewish state to a greater degree. You also get the idea that both Stalin and Hitler were of the same cloth. Stalin's cruelty included forcing all the Germans out of East Prussia in whose place the Poles and Soviet miltary gladly settled. No wonder Patton wanted to march into Moscow on a tank. We in the West had a "cake walk" coming into WWII at such a late date. I thought it a great and enlightening book. It gives a broader perspective to Eureopean History as a whole. Western History as taught lacks the perspective that is brought out by this book.
Rating:
Summary: great read
Review: Prussia is a facinating topic, mainly because it's so mysterious to many history buffs. This book is a great primer for anyone interested in German and Eastern European history. A very informal, easy-to-read book.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting Read, If you Ignore the Anti-Polish Bias
Review: Readers interested in the the former East Prussia should make the effort to read The Vanished Kingdom, as it provides a good description of the German elements of the history of this region. The main disappointment with this book is that the author's views on the superiority of German culture over Polish culture are reflected throughout the book, making it a very one-sided account of history. Sometimes it is difficult to even take the author seriously (for example, he writes at one point that a group of drunk Poles in a bar represented the only friendly Poles he had encountered throughout all of his travels through Poland). Essentially, he equates all things German with progress and culture and all things Polish with backwardness and decay. The book unreasonably dismisses Polish historical claims to the region, and at points appears to attempt to portray the Poles as being the most anti-semitic of all Europeans. Although the book excellently describes the German history of this region, it is not the balanced analysis that I had hoped for.
Rating: 
Summary: In the nationalist tradition of Treitschke.
Review: This book is a misguided, ahistorical disaster. "The Vanished Kingdom" is nothing more than a convoluted travel diary with no worthwhile insights. It is bigoted, unintelligent, and overflowing with historical inaccuracies. When describing the Franco-Prussian war, Roy writes: "This conflict resulted in the formal creation of the German empire at Versailles Palace on January 18, 1871, its Hall of Mirrors then full of generals in cuirasses and pointed helmets, their swords drawn and yelling Hunnish war cries to the new Emperor William I." Roy is not describing the event; he is describing the famous painting by Anton von Werner, which was obviously a de facto "enhancement" of the coronation by the great nationalist artist. (In reality, the whole thing was a very muted affair.) Similar sloppiness pervades the rest of the text. On page 104, the Great Elector is called "King of Prussia," when he was actually "King in Prussia" - a very slight, but nevertheless important, distinction. Roy also ridiculously asserts that the Hohenzollerns were xenophobic and determined to keep their nation ethnically Prussian. He doesn't mention the 1685 Edict of Potsdam, which extended an open invitation to French Huguenots (of which 20,000 came) or the similarly enormous influx of Salzburgers into East Prussia. As for Roy's travels and "interviews," the only point that is repeatedly made is that Poles are "mean" and "stupid," and Germans "orderly" and "great." Roy even includes pictures of drunken Russians and Poles in this book. (After all, they are the only ones who consume alcohol, right?) In the meantime, Roy's "German friends" - who are all coincidentally rightist reactionaries and angry Wehrmacht veterans - chat poetically about spilling their blood for sacred Prussian soil. This book is a joke. If you are interested in the history of Brandenburg-Prussia, you will find Alexandra Richie's "Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin" to be infinitely more rewarding than this overblown, hackneyed harangue.
Rating: 
Summary: Searching for traces in an ethnically cleansed province
Review: This book is quite readable and interesting. So what's wrong with it? The author is terribly insulting towards Poles. They are frequently portrayed as drunks and nasty drunks, and he repeatedly makes the mistake of writing what he assumes they are saying to him, although his knowledge of the Polish language seems to be minimal. James Roy's comment about the Polish Home Army acting horribly towards Polish Jews strikes me as a bit one-sided. Perhaps he could have mentioned prominent Polish Jews such as Jacob Berman and Schlomo Morel(a mass murderer and torturer currently hiding out in Israel as a fugitve from Polish justice)who were instrumental in turning post-war Poland into a massive Stalinist concentration camp for Polish Catholics, all the while murdering/ethnically cleansing the former population of Germans. The strong point of this book is its explanation of Prussian history. If you can put up with the frequent put downs of Poles and the barbs thrown at the Germans/Prussians, then it makes for good reading.
Rating:
Summary: A pack of nationalistic lies
Review: This book should never have been published. One thing we do not need is nostalgia for Prussia - a state that was hated, while it existed, by all its neighbours, that expanded by systematic aggression and banditry, and that became joyfully identified with a doctrine of extreme immoralism in politics and military aggression as the basis of international relations. The author feels the need to slander the Poles in order to make us forget not only what Hitler did, but what Prussia had been doing to them since the First Partition; so he represents them as drunks and congenital Jew-baiters (but Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe - until Germany decided to do something about it). Other reviewers have said what needed to be said about the rotten double standards, the lousy history and map, the racism, the single-minded intention to rewrite history - but I have one more thing to say: find me another country in European history that ever drew, throughout its history, the hatred and contempt that Prussia drew from the age of Frederick the so-called Great to Hitler. If Prussia was so great, why did it manage the unusual feat of (for instance) making Chesterton and Kipling unanimous in their detestation? Is there another nation that has so managed to unify Europe, uninting it three times over - in the Seven Years' War, and in the two World Wars - in war, and uniting it constantly in dislike? And it is always those who knew Prussia and Prussian Germany best, that hated it the most: unlike France in the age of the Sun King and of Napoleon - where people fought French aggression but imitated French art and administration - and unlike the USA today, nobody ever wanted to imitate Prussia once they had seen what it was like. People like F.D.Roosevelt, who spent one year there as a young man, went back home with a rooted dislike to the whole Prussian/German system that was to have long-lasting results. Believe me, Mr.Roy, the biggest favour anyone ever did to Germany was done in 1945 and included the complete territorial destruction of Prussia. As for the Hindenburg family vaults being used as a garbage dump - well, it hardly counts as a change of use, does it?
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