An Atlas of Extinct Countries: The Remarkable (and Occasionally Ridiculous) Stories of 48 Nations that Fell off the Map

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 are just daft stories we tell each other. They’re all equally implausible once you get up close’Countries die. Sometimes it’s murder | sometimes it’s by accident | and sometimes it’s because they were so ludicrous they didn’t 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 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 fails to do that. And that is mainly because most of these dead nations (and a lot of the ones that are still alive) are so weird or borderline nonsensical that it’s impossible to skip the embarrassing stuff.The life stories of the sadly deceased involve a catalogue of chancers | racists | racist chancers | conmen | madmen | people trying to get out of paying tax | mistakes | lies | stupid schemes and General Idiocy. Because of this – and because treating nation states with too much respect is the entire problem with pretty much everything – these accounts are not fussed about adding to all the earnest flag saluting in the world | however nice some of the flags are.