 Book Review
Beautifully written and excellent companion to events as they unfold even today in the Balkans and further east. Highly recommended.
The Author did a wondeful job!!
The book itself is wonderful and author does a wonderful job of explaining the years of conflict in the in this particular region of the world. There are times particularly in the introduction when you want the author to shut up and get on with the story. Later on you see how much this one example(in the beginning) kind of weaves all of the points to come together. Overall-Good book if you like history (and good journalism)
 An Enlightening Guide to a Shattered and Benighted Land
For a thousand years the Balkan peninsula has been the situs of vast cultural upheavals -- the sensibilities and hatreds of the Slavic peoples pushed and pulled and molded by the East and West, by Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Islam, Communism and Nazism. The result is a tragic legacy of manipulation, of hatred, of violence and of death.Simon Winchester proves himself the perfect guide to this shattered and tragic realm. He is part History Professor, part Philosopher but always a masterful Storyteller. With this and his previous books (especially "The Professor and the Madman") he proves himself to be one of the most eloquent and gripping narrative writers working today. Some other thoughts: 1. This book ought to be required reading for every American and a warning about the horrible consequences of hate. One of the greatest tragedies of the Balkan conflict is that, as Winchester puts it, "almost all the people who have been so horribly at odds with one another are all, in essential ethnic terms, the self-same people." And lest Europeans and Americans feel smug in their own situations, let them remember the calamities of Antietam, of The Somme, and of Auschwitz. 2. The smart reader will prepare himself or herself with two things before reading. First, a good map. The history of the Balkans is so utterly complex on many different levels, not the least of which is geographically. Second, a good dictionary. Not since Henry Kissinger have I read an author with his quiver so full of (to me) new and interesting words: e.g. from only the first fifty pages I noted, emollient, osmotically, ordure, gyre, excrescences, orotund, refulgent, meretricious, harquebuses, embrasures, barbicans and ravelins. 3. The editing of this book is horrendously sloppy -- it is an embarrassment to Harper Collins. I have never seen so many typographical errors, missing phrases and other stupid mistakes. 4. This is not Winchester's best work. The early chapters are among his best work, but the narrative loses significant punch beginning in chapter six, which deals with the authors time in Montenegro.
Raconteur on a shelled-out road - Winchester on the Balkans
It's a pleasure to read reminiscences of masterful writers such as William F. Buckley (his sailing books have won him a well-deserved place of honor in sports writing) and Simon Winchester... and as he has seen Yugoslavia in her salad days, prosperous and peaceful, then returned to catalogue the horrors that followed her dissolution, Winchester is the perfect guide through that terribly unhappy place.
Winchester takes us with him on journeys along the Dalmatian coast (through land that is now divided unequally between Croatia, the Bosnian Serb Republic, and the patchwork government of Bosnia-Hercegovina), through the vainglorious, charming and not yet war-torn land of Montenegro, across the ghastly fields of Kosovo just as the Serbs withdrew before NATO forces, across Macedonia, then through parts of Eastern Europe that have been spared the advantages of Serbian leadership and thus remain peaceful and happy.
All through his travels, Winchester shows us the people who live in these lands, shares with us his bemusement at the human capacity to live around disaster and his shock and sorrow at our capacity to abandon our humanity when we go a-warring, to save our worst outrages for our close neighbors, and forget that Europe has been Christian for nearly 1800 years or, for that matter, what the word "Christian" means.
Winchester's command of the history of the area is intimidating and overpowering... he shows us entire worlds that we never suspected even existed... capital cities nestled in remote mountain summits and ruled by dynasties of hereditary bishops, places where there are two Orthodox churches vying for a shrinking pool of believers, customs sublime and gross.
I usually hesitate to award a perfect score to a book, no matter how well-written - but Simon Winchester has defeated me. His is a complete book, and for me to criticize it would be sheer effrontery. Buy it, read it, and be delighted.
A Book that Provokes Questions from the Reader
A very probing look into the Balkans, Winchester's book raises simple yet profound questions about the hatred between so many peoples in the Balkans. The author did a very good job of putting the smoldering anger and resentment in historical perspective taking us not just back to the Austria-Hungary and Ottoman empires, but even further back to the Byzantine empire! It is this historical perspective that makes the questions so well thought out. In the end, Winchester has no answers, and I found myself disappointed that I could not have simple answers to such difficult questions. I walked away from the book with a better understanding, but every bit as puzzled, as when I entered the book, so it has provoked me to look deeper into the subject. It has put me on a path to learn more about the region.
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