The book is a memoir of Lucjan Krause, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Windsor in Canada. Born in Poznań in 1928, as a scout and Home Army soldier, he took part in the Warsaw Uprising and after its failure was sent to a POW camp in Germany. The first part of the book focuses on this period in his life and presents a vivid description of many dramatic events from an eyewitness perspective. In 1951, after graduating from the University of London, Lucjan Krause emigrated to Canada and was awarded his PhD in Physics at the University of Toronto. Afterwards he created a vibrant experimental centre for atomic and molecular physics at the University of Windsor. In the past fifty years numerous physicists from Toruń and other Polish scientific centres have participated in research conducted there as postdoctoral fellows. It was possible thanks to the cooperation initiated in 1963 by Lucjan Krause and Aleksander Jabłoński, the Head of the Physics Department of Nicolaus Copernicus University. The second part of Lucjan Krause’s book presents his account of this cooperation which allowed many Polish physicists to conduct experiments with the use of advanced equipment, not available in Poland at that time. In this way, Professor Lucjan Krause contributed significantly to the development of physics in Poland. Thus, Professor Lucjan Krause’s memoir represents not only an essential contribution to the history of the development of atomic physics in the last four decades of the 20th century in Canada and Poland, but also provides insight into Polish-Canadian scientific relations.

The Baltic macroregion is a platform for the development of different areas of international cooperation, which are an important factor affecting the socioeconomic growth of the region’s states. The deteriorating political relations between Russia and its Baltic neighbours complicate the development of mutual connections. However, economic and sociocultural cooperation and joint environmental projects continue despite all the difficulties. Based on recent studies carried out by Russian and Polish researchers, this book examines current trends in the socioeconomic development of the region’s countries and various forms of transboundary cooperation and provides recommendations for further development. Special attention is paid to sustainable environmental management and environmental protection, transboundary ties among companies and among people, the development of international tourism, opportunities for reinforcing the contact function of the border, and spatial planning. The book addresses theoretical problems that are of crucial significance to economic development and transboundary cooperation, namely, those of path dependence, the emerge.