Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)

This book was a present and arrived 2 days before the due date, so that was a bonus. Thank you Wordery.

If you love the Balkans, and we do, this book is worth the effort. It is a little tiresome at times, but that is because of the times in which it was written. This area is strategic to us all at the crossroads of culture, religion and political ideology. It is revealing to read what was being made of it, back before Communism, and interesting to reflect that maybe Communism hasn't changed things that much.

I learned a lot from reading this book. It is thoughly researched with excellent and valid references. The book provides for a better understanding of the background for the recent wars of the 1990s. This part of the world has been and still is exploited by the world powers that create divisions among the people of these lands. Anyone interested in that part of the world, now that all of history is being re-written, should read this book.

Although some reader comments led me to become concerned about the quality of the Kindle ebook, I am happy to report that the purchased ebook looks perfectly acceptable -- and I've tried viewing it on a 10th generation Paperwhite, an 11th generation Paperwhite and the Kindle app for Android. (BTW, I format ebooks for a living!) My guess is that a previous version was flawed with serious encoding errors, and the ebook publisher fixed them all. However, some users may not have changed the Setting to allow automatic updates, so they are still seeing the original flawed version. You can update your version in many ways -- from the settings on the device or even from the Amazon website with MANAGE YOUR CONTENT AND DEVICES. If you are still unable to see the latest version, I'm sure Amazon support can help you. It's so wonderful to see this classic work on ebook...

At 1,200 pages, you could probably kill someone by hitting them over the head with a copy of BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON. It would be more appropriate, in most cases, to instead recommend that they read this wonderful and amazing tale of a pre-World War II trip by Rebecca West and her husband through Yugoslavia. Yes, Yugoslavia doesn't really exist any more and it says much about the character and personality that allowed Josip Broz Tito to weave a diverse handful of Balkan countries into the Yugoslavia that existed for a half-century starting during that war. It seems the Serbs, the Croats, the Dalmatians, the Macedonians and all the other residents of the future Yugoslavia had wonderfully hateful reasons for turning their backs on one another over the centuries. West provides the historical and cultural backgrounds for the quirks and quarrels that kept these little nation states at war or, at least, at odds with their neighbors. The nation of Yugoslavia had not yet been put together by Tito when West and her husband journeyed through each of the small entities where centuries of hatred between its residents made the Balkans synonymous with political fracture. She notes the differences -- in habits, customs, economies, religions and ethnicities -- and provides incisive looks back into the histories of the places she spends time. This book has given me more insightful glances of the historical reasons the Balkans are Balkanized than anything I've ever come across. But it's more than history that drew me to West's tome: she has a dry wit that provides many an aside that helps us understand what she saw and what she thought of the new people with their new, to her, ways of cooking, of worshipping and of making a living. It makes foe wonderful reading, especially if you can space it out over a few months! This is a great book, a classic!