num_pages: 304
description: Prisoners of Geography meets Bill Bryson: a funny fascinating beautifully illustrated  and timely  history of countries that for myriad and often ludicrous reasons no longer exist.Countries die. Sometimes it's murder sometimes it's by accident and sometimes it's because they were so ludicrous they didnt deserve to exist in the first place. Occasionally they explode violently. A few slip away almost unnoticed. Often the cause of death is either 'got too greedy' or 'Napoleon turned up'. Now and then they just hold a referendum and vote themselves out of existence.This is an atlas of 48 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 refuses to do so because these dead nations are so full of schemers racists and con men that it's impossible to skip the embarrassing stuff.Because of this - and because treating nation-states with too much reverence is the entire problem with pretty much everything - these accounts are not concerned with adding to the earnest flag saluting in the world however nice some of the flags might be.
language: English
title: An Atlas of Extinct Countries
publisher: Europa Editions