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When I opened this book, A Biography of No Place—which is, in fact, about a region in Ukraine—and saw the map on the first page, I decided it must have been providence that prompted the editor of this journal to ask me to review the work of Kate Brown. Indeed, almost every city on the map evoked vivid memories from my childhood. In one important aspect the book is indeed impressive. The author musters the formidable work of a devoted historian. She has laboriously searched many archives and interviewed dozens of people in various places and traveled even to Kazakhstan to find information on the deported Germans and Poles who, along with the Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians, made this region—" the borderland" to use the author's terms—ethnically diverse. The author boldly advances a number of theoretical constructions that she tests with vehemence in her book—from the first page to the last. The …