A wonderfully accessible and often amusing account of Roy Redgrave's family and military career set in the context of a world engulfed in warfare and intrigue. His background is as complicated and interesting as one might expect from a member of the Redgrave clan and his anecdotes provide the reader with an insight into a career filled with incident. Thoroughly recommended!

The television media is a kind of window on the American house of information. It is an obscure window made of stained glass which one has to crawl up close to and press their face against in order to see anything outside. Still a man's view is obscured. The only thing one really looks at is the t.v. itself, to admire the stained glass window. Newspaper media is a sort of Bay window offering a wide clear view of the landscape and looking out in several directions depending on the newspaper. The radio, the disembodied voice, a skylight. BALKAN BLUES on the other hand is a book functioning as a portal. Rather than looking out of the American house it invites its visitors, the various authors of its stories, to enter and entreats us to understand something about who they are and appeals to the complexity of the places they live. Places outside our own house.

Palairet's contribution to the Balkan Economic history is the sixth volume of the Cambridge Studies in Modern Economic history series. The series are described as a new initiative in the writing of the economic history dictated by the concerns of the history of economic performance, output and productivity with a direct reference to the evolutions and impacts of economic growth or stagnation. The volumes are mentioned as written in line with the mainstream of the series. As far as Palairet's volume is concerned, his outcome, which is basically derived from a long term comparative analysis of the performance of the Balkan economies, reconciles with this phenomenon. His deductive, in-depth study of the Balkan economies from early 19th century until 1914, suggests a deploring performance rather than growth, though agricultural production steadily increased, a level of industrialisation attained, nevertheless per capita output and income never caught up the levels of the pre-modern and pre-liberation times. The pre-liberation times overlapped with the sovereignty of the Ottoman rule for most of the Balkan states except Serbia enjoying an independent status after 1815. Such a long term overall comparative analysis requires periodization which is strictly reflected in the chapter formation of the book. During the period under consideration, Balkan economies had passed through two institutional transformation, the first being the breakdown of the Ottoman decentralised administrative structre, which was major push effect of the Balkan economic growth and the second, the emergence of the independent balkan states which curtailed down the economic development. Agriculture production had severely been hit by the subsistence farming, already set up by the self governments to establish a peasant power base for the new regime. The textile proto-industries could not be able to sustain out-put levels and the market share of the pre-liberation era. I do really impressed by the author's in-depth analysis of the Balkan economies, utilising both the qualitative and the quantitative data, covering almost, as far as we assume, all the primary and secondary sources on Balkan Economic History. Essential feature of the book is to indicate how contraversial is to associate Ottoman political structre with stagnation, underdevelopment and retrogression.

In Balkan Farewells, Drazan Gunjaca finds humanity in the midst of war torn ex Yugoslavia. He writes of the lives and loves of a group of friends who should be enemies because of their place of birth, but instead retain their friendship through the tragedy of war. Told from the perspective of Robi, an ex soldier who is attempting to regain some semblance of his former life, when he is asked to go back to the front line and rescue his nephew . As grim as it sounds Balkan Farewells brims with a black humor that can only come when lives are on the line. Beautifully written, it captures the spirit of a people who have been at war forever. A worthy winner of the Peace Prize for literature at the Premio Stayagraha 2002, Riccione, Italy.

This is a masterfully written and extensively researched book that fills an important gap in the historical scholarship on the twentieth century southeastern Europe. The author carefully examines the political role and influence of religion and argues that none of the main ethnic religions, the Serbian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic "Church of the Croat People," and Yugoslav Islamic community, ever endorsed the idea of multiconfessional and multiethnic Yugoslav state. Powerful ethnoclericalism prevented full legitimization of both the inter-war Yugoslav monarchy and of the post-war socialist Yugoslavia. The author correctly argues that politically active clergy fused religious intolerance with nationalistic animosity to create "ethnic churches" in form and nationalistic parties in substance. The clergy departed from their original purpose and became hypernationalistic, antiliberal, and antisecular leaders who lacked the accountability of their secular counterparts.
I commend it highly.

This readable and well researched study of the Serbian community in Croatia sheds bright light on the political, ethic, and regional rivalries that endure in the tragedy of modern Yugoslavia.

An excellent review of the political manuevering that the Republic of Dubrovnik had to do to maintain it's autonomy from the clutches of Venice and the Ottoman Empire. A great book for people interested in the history of this beautiful former city state located in today's Croatia.

Just like the back cover says, this is an excellent reference book for high school and college students studying the Balkans. After checking out over 20 sources for a term paper on Yugoslavia, this book turned out to be the one I cited most.

Paul Stephenson reached several conclusions that are really revolutionary for the study of the Byzantine administration in the Balkan provinces. The increasing interest for the Balkan history (not only for the modern times) denotes the need to understand the roots of the present conflicts. Stephenson's book explains how and why the disintegration of the Byzantine administration and the emergence of the ethnic states in the Balkans were possible. His main idea is that "Byzantine authority was almost always exercised through existing local power structures". Can we consider these surviving local structures to be a cause of the future Balkan separatism, even if they were not always the expression of "national" solidarities ? We think so, because also the Ottoman administration preserved and used in its interest the power of some Albanian, Serbian and Bosniac local potentates, after their conversion to Islam and even before. Stephenson has payed a special attention to the significance of the frontier as an ideological limit between the civilized world and the barbarians. He also introduces a new concept: the internal frontiers of the territories mastered by the local authochtonous rulers by whom the Byzantine administration was exerted. The book brings valuable arguments for the new interpretation of the 11th century supported by P. Lemerle and more recently by M. Angold against Ostrogorsky's old viewpoint. Stephenson shows that the shift to 'civilian' government was not a decline, because "the Byzantine economy was growing rapidly" and that the defence policy based on warfare was replaced with a more adecquate policy based on trade and gifts for the barbarians ("traiding, not raiding"). He considers that Basil II left a poisoned legacy: a too large and expensive army, and that his 'civilian' successors tried to transform the general strategy after the hard Pecheneg inroads of 1036, when became obvious that a classical limes is not useful. Unlike many works of Byzantine political history, this book gives much attention to the rich archaeological and numismatic evidence, carefully used in order to supply the scarcity of the literary sources. Some points are disputable or even wrong, but, generally speaking, the use of archaeology led him to important conclusions I consider that the most important Stephenson's contributions concern the history of the Paradunavon province (in northern Bulgaria and Dobrudja) and the Byzantine-Hungarian relations in the 12th century. Other subjects dealt in are: the Byzantine conquest of Bulgaria, the restoration of this state after the rebellion led by the Vlach rulers Peter and Asan in the form of a Romanian-Bulgarian state, the small Slavic principalities in the Serbian lands. Albeit a high-scientific work, this book can easily be read by any people interested in the medieval history. We can be sure that this book will be considered a major contribution to the history of the South-Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages.

Dr. Alexandru Madgearu

Clark's book is an excellent and thoroughly researched history of the little know civil resistance movement in Kosovo that sprang up in the early 1990s until war broke out in 1998. Clark's research is impeccable (much of it first hand) and this piece is a must read for anyone trying to get a more thorough understanding of this conflict.