Modris Eksteins, a history professor at the University of Toronto, and author of the acclaimed and controversial Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, tells both his personal story and the history of the Baltic countries in his latest book.

Eksteins’ story includes his great grandmother Greita, a 19th-century chambermaid who had a liaison with a German baron, Eksteins’ own birth in Latvia in 1943, his family’s escape from the chaos of postwar Europe, and his adaptation to the staid respectability of Canada.

In parallel, the author relates the little-known history of the Baltic countries from the Teutonic Knights to the collapse of the former Soviet Union. As history, it has everything from tragedy to elements of comic opera. All the major themes of our century are acted out here: war, fanaticism, self-determination, and totalitarianism.

The unifying point of both the personal and the global is 1945; “Stunde Null, hour zero,” – the end of the Second World War – and “the centre of our century and our meaning.” All the stories lead, forward or back, to here, and it is only by understanding that “emptiness at the heart of civilization” that our world makes sense.

Walking Since Daybreak is illuminating, entertaining, and thought-provoking. It is neither an autobiography nor a record of the past but a valuable account: In spare, readable prose, Eksteins shows why history is important.