An excellent close-up look at the Yugoslavs before the collapse and before Tito's death. The author was born in Yugoslavia, grew up abroad, then returned as a newspaper correspondent. The book is particularly insightful because Doder was able to write about the very real fissures in Yugoslav society before it became politically incorrect to do so.

Dusko Doder and Louise Branson's book covers Milosevic's life and path to power up to Kosovo, when NATO bombardment of Belgrade forced him to back down. The book reveals how Milosevic gave himself a name in 1987, when his boss, Serbian Communist Party leader Ivan Stambolic, sent him to Kosovo to quell down Serbian riots. When confronted by protesters who told them the Kosovo Albanians were beating them, he uttered the phrase, "No one will ever dare beat you again." He became a hero from that day on, a figure to whom the Serbs could rally around.

Milosevic knew that too and betrayed Stambolic, his political mentor, to become president of Serbia. The important things here are the parallels and dissimilarities between Tito and Milosevic. Tito, a communist, wanted a united Yugoslavia, a nation of Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, Macedonians, Muslims, and Kosovars. Milosevic, a nationalist, wanted a united Serbia, but only for the Serbs. And he wanted to be leader of all Serbs, meaning the Montenegrins, Serbs in Serbia, Bosnian Serbs, and the Krajina Serbs. He even told Milan Panic, Yugoslavia's prime minister, that he was the "Ayatollah Khomeini of Serbia. The Serbs will follow me no matter what."

The trouble with that was, the Serbs in those other areas already had their own leaders, such as Radovan Karadzic, so he had to discredit them or put them down under his thumb, which ultimately didn't work.

Some things that have come to light is the back door deal between Milosevic and then-Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, on dividing Bosnia between them. Milosevic didn't care if he lost the Serb-populated Krajina and Eastern Slavonia, both in Croatia, saying that he would repopulate Kosovo with the Serbs from those regions.

But when the chips fall down, Milosevic used nationalism to get power for himself. The beginning of the end came in the middle of the war in Bosnia, when he was beset by UN sanctions and the Western economic blockade. His own position eroding so he endorsed the Vance-Owen plan to divide Bosnia into ten cantons--3 Serb, 3 Muslim, 2 Croat, 1 (Muslim-Croat), with Sarajevo organized like Washington D.C. Karadzic was vehemently against it and split with Milosevic.

Milosevic was the "man of the hour" at the Dayton talks, in which he agreed to give Sarajevo, the holy grail to Bosnian Serbs, to Muslims, as well as division of Republika Srpska by the Posovina corridor. It was not his to give, but he did it to make himself the good Serb to the West and to cut the Bosnian Serbs down to size. However, this move alienated him from true nationalists such as Karadzic and militia leader Vojislav Sesejl.

Milosevic seems no better than a schoolyard bully. He torments the weak but upon facing someone stronger, backs down, as he did in Kosovo. It took the non-violent student group OTPOR to oust him, but that's another book, which I hope is well-researched and documented like this book.

Some argue that Milosevic is solely responsible for the terrible deeds committed during the civil war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s: without the nationalist indoctrination and provocation undertaken by this tyrant, the war may never have taken place. Others argue that the war was inevitable, and that Milosevic was merely acting out a role that any Serbian leader in those circumstances was destined to play: the real villains here are the people of the former Yugoslavia who bear centuries-old grudges against their neighbours and are willing to obey orders to commit heinous moral crimes.

One would expect a biographer to adopt the former, 'Great Man Theory of History' position, and a historian to adopt the latter position, with its emphasis on longer-term historical processes. The authors strike an appropriate mix between these two explanations. As the title suggests, they pull no punches in depicting Milosevic as the epitome of Machiavellian evil, but they are also sensitive to the details of the social and political environment which allowed him to rise to the top. As such, the book reads less like a biography than an in-depth political history of Yugoslavia between the late-1980s and the present, and is therefore of interest to students of political science.

Milosevic met his future wife Mirjana Markovic at high school in Pozarevac. They also studied together at Belgrade University. Mira studied sociology and was by all accounts an outspoken firebrand; Sloba studied law and was by all accounts a dull spirit and unoriginal thinker - perfect, it would seem, for a career in the Communist Party. Slobodan's political instincts were finely tuned to the times. He knew that to climb up the Communist Party hierarchy, he had to have a mentor. Ivan Stambolic, a friend from Belgrade University, played this role for Milosevic. Articulate and well-connected, he moved up the hierarchy, and by 1975, he was Prime Minister of Serbia. Crucially, he never forgot about Milosevic. Slobodan followed him nearly every step of the way, until the late 1980s, when he started scheming to replace his former friend in the top job.

It was at this point that Milosevic made his infamous conversion from communism to nationalism, with typical Machiavellian poise. In April 1987, Kosovo was about to erupt into civil unrest, with the minority Serb population complaining about their treatment by the majority Albanian population and threatening a mass exodus. Prime Minister Stambolic ordered Milosevic to visit the province in order to calm both sides down. To put it succinctly, he disobeyed orders. Instead of calming them, Milosevic declared to an angry Serbian crowd that "No one will defeat you again". The ecstatic response of the crowd must have seared into Milosevic's mind the importance of the nationalist card. Over the next months and years he assembled a coalition with the aim of protecting Serbian rights from being trampled by her neighbours.

The Serbian nationalist mindset seems to be a curious mixture of glorification of military defeat (the 14th century Battle of Kosovo was an enormous defeat for the Serbs) and a belief that her neighbours are unjustly benefitting from the bravery of the Serbs in defending their freedom. Of course, there is some merit in the idea that the Serbs have received the rough end of the stick for centuries and should not be subjugated simply to preserve some delicate balance of power, as Tito evidently intended. However Serbia, with Milosevic at its helm, was surely the central player in the collapse and civil war that took place in the 1990s. When it was clear that the country was disintegrating, Milosevic made a secret deal with Slovenia, to allow it to secede. After the unilateral secession of Croatia in 1991, Milosevic planned to incorporate large swathes of Croatia in which there were Serb majorities. Infamously, he united with Croatia's Franjo Tudjman to invade Bosnia-Herzegovina and divide the spoils.

Doder and Branson also alert us to the wider international context in which the civil war was played out. The United Nations, and the various peace envoys sent to negotiate truces, assumed that self-determination for the various 'parts' of Yugoslavia was not only the answer, but the right thing to do. In the process, the beliefs of the substantial minority of people who saw themselves as first and foremost 'Yugoslavian' (but were perhaps not as vocal as the extreme nationalists) were disregarded. One is reminded of the current centripetal forces in Indonesia, and whether the United Nations would support its break-up.

The authors also point to the significant support of Milosevic by the United States, perhaps an extension of the tradition in American foreign policy of supporting dictatorships if they bring stability to the region. Milosevic was depicted as a peacemaker at the Dayton Peace Accords - requests to America by the Serbian opposition parties for assistance in deposing him were rebuffed. Four years later, however, following the collapse of the Rambouillet talks over Kosovo, Milosevic was depicted as a warmonger and the full force of NATO was brought against his nation.

Milosevic: Portrait of a Tyrant is valuable book for students interested in Yugoslavia's post-war political history, particularly since the 1980s. Written in 2000, it obviously excludes the war crimes indictment and trial. This process alone will require another Eichmann in Jerusalem, although given his recent performance, the focus ought to be the farce, rather than the banality, of evil.

2001: Slobodan Milosevic appeared in court somber-faced; remaining as defiant and arrogant as ever in response to the charges leveled at him by a presiding judge. It seems like he was brought to justice only by chance; consequently his indictment and later arrest proves that no war criminal can hide forever. His name cropped up repeatedly when war in Kosovo broke out in 1998 and more so when NATO forces intervened and bombed rump Yugoslavia throughout the spring and early summer of 1999. Years before, in Bosnia, he was seen as a problem-solver, appeasing opposing parties and mediators at the Dayton Accords. Three years later, he was seen as the opposite: manipulative, conniving, secretive, deceiving and a perpetrator of gross human rights. The question of his life and background has remained constant, one of speculation and mystery.

Dusko Doder and Louise Branson, therefore, have written the first definitive biography of Slobodan Milosevic. Although their work appeared some time before he was overthrown in October 2000 and later brought to justice in The Hague (obviously the biography is now in need of a little bit of revision in order for it to be up-to-date), it helped to place the Kosovo war into its proper context by focusing on Milosevic, who to all intended purposes, ignited the ethnic question in the Serbian province to his own advantage and did not balk at violating human rights toward transforming Kosovo into a province dominated by Serbs.

His early years, through his birth in Pozarevac, Serbia, on August 22, 1941, to his time at Belgrade University where he became a Communist Party member that played an important role in his development, are detailed in this biography. Emphasis is placed on Milosevic's two-faced diplomacy abroad and at home, where friends one day became enemies to be 'removed,' just like the people under his rule, seen through the wars in (respectively) Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

The biography is written and reads like a fast-paced novel, filled with all the almost unreal espionage and seedy characters to be ideally found in fiction. A study of Yugoslavia's demise is incomplete without Doder and Branson's magnificent and revealing biography; to date, there are other works coming out, and surely more will appear, but it remains to be seen if they surpass the current.