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 nonsensic
