Regarding "Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956", would you say you were consciously reading it with an eye to reviewing its technical merits, ie reliable sources, and analysing them well, or was it more reading for pleasure - or indeed, are the two one and the same? Or is it something completely different to any of those?
I read it for a couple reasons, first being that I am currently focusing on Eastern European history, politics, and international relations in the new degree, and second that it is something I am genuinely interested in both on its own behalf and for present-day resonances. So I am reading it as a trained historian but also because I am interested in the subject and want to learn more, so it's not like I'm just confirming stuff that I already know. On which, a few quick points on how to read like a historian:
I admire Anne Applebaum's stuff a lot, and it has earned external acclaim: for example her previous book Gulag won the Pulitzer Prize. This is a good indication that an author has legitimate credentials and strong research about the topic at hand, and that it has been recognized by multiple international experts and prize bodies. Obviously, not every book needs to have won the Pulitzer to prove its usefulness, but it does mean that it comes from a historian who has received thorough and positive peer review on the highest level. I also recommend her book Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine.
Next, she is upfront about how she approached her sources, where she found them, and the language and access logistics. She is based in Warsaw, speaks Polish and Russian, and was able to directly translate sources in those languages; for Iron Curtain, she names her research assistants/translators in Hungarian and German and which archives they were working in. She notes that it took six years to write the book because of the necessity of consulting these far-flung document archives in different places; she has also conducted some in-person interviews. There is an extensive bibliography and direction for future reading. As well, despite the complexity of her subject, she is a very clear and easy-to-follow writer; someone who was approaching the book and knew relatively little about the regions or the major research questions would be able to follow along. I have recently read several history books where I was interested in the topic and wanted to follow along, but the writing was unnecessarily murky, unclear, or convoluted, and which made it difficult to keep up, even in those books written and published by a popular press.
Next, while she obviously wants to explore the problems of these societies and the phenomenon of totalitarian government in detail, she attempts to present both perspectives: both why these societies were initially attractive, the social and political factors of destroyed postwar Europe that enabled their implementation, and what ordinary people thought and experienced in response. While she is very clear that this was a Soviet effort based in Moscow and based on Stalinist principles, she also underlines that it was not just a situation of one-way agency where totalitarian principles were being unilaterally imposed on a hapless population without any local collaboration or support. She explores the reasons why local East German/Polish/Hungarian authorities decided to cooperate (or not cooperate) with the occupying authoritarian power, how people in each of those places did the same, and the fact that the totalitarian project was indeed made possible largely because of this collaboration (and when the collaboration was revoked, it instantly ran into major difficulties). That is an important lesson for the present day when we are looking at those organizations, corporations, and individuals that have already pre-emptively offered their support to a fascist government, and are acting in happy accordance with it.
As such, in short-ish summary, there are several ways to read a popular-press history book: for the analysis of technical/historical skills, to consider how the narrative is presented and the conclusions that are drawn, the bibliography and resources that are offered, simply because I am interested in the topic and want to learn more, and because it has important lessons for the present day. So yes.
