Customer Reviews

Croatia: A History

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Goldstein, a professor at the University of Zagreb, wrote this history specifically to be translated for non-Croatian readers. Therefore its brevity must be considered a virtue, as most readers would not have the patience nor the interest to wade through hundreds of pages on medieval Balkan history. However, it does not provide anything more than a series of dates and vaguely connected events until hitting its stride in the 20th century. Left largely untold are the fascinating stories of Croatia's more distant past. Tomislav, the first Croatian king who ushered in early westernizing influences merits but six vague lines, while Jelacic, the tragic nineteenth-century hero gets more attention but Goldstein fails to describe either his military campaigns or the fascinating story of his decline and death. Readers who know nothing of Croatia will find little in the first hundred pages to capture their attention, and readers with some background will find nothing new to pique their interest.

The chapters on the twentieth century are the strongest. The spare descriptions of World War II, post-war politics, and the recent wars in Croatia and Bosnia are clear and unclouded by gratuitous political partisanship. A passage (p.187) debunking the popular myth that Tito somehow 'solved' Yugoslavia's ethnic problems is particularly insightful. Goldstein is clearly a Croatian patriot, but he is no nationalist and no apologist for Tudjman's corrupt and hateful brand of politics. He criticizes Tudjman and Milosevic and the Krajina Serbs equally. The book would be stronger had the first hundred pages been reduced to a quick overview, and the subsequent chapters on the 20th century expanded and strengthened.

The book is a good one, more pointed and less partisan than Marcus Tanner's. The maps are generally good (a county chart showing Serb minority populations in 1991, and a map explaining Operation Storm are excellent), with the exception that there is no map on the Bosnian war, although there is a chapter devoted to it. The translation is generally strong, but the book is filled with typos and editorial oversights ("till" to mean "until", awkward sentences, and frequent misspellings). The strength of this history is its balance, the weakness is its lack of anecdote or interesting color.

I purchased this book based on customer reviews posted at that time. Some of the reviews were posted by Croatian scholars and they were very positive. I was under the impression that I would be provided with an unbiased history of Croatia and its conflicts. The reviews also indicated that the book would highlight only the most significant historical details.

This book may be a relatively unbiased account and I will assume that the details covered only the most significant events, however the presentation of this information was extremely difficult to follow. The book includes very few summary paragraphs to introduce broad historical movements and their impact before diving into often exceptionally detailed accounts of specific incidents. There was rarely an adequate summary or closure to a chapter. Some of the most important events were somewhat hidden and de-emphasized. No brief descriptions of significant historical figures and their impact were included. Their names were only briefly mentioned in connection to a specific event, then these figures were sometimes discussed later in the text as being important. IN addition, the order of events was not consistently chronological. More maps with greater detail would have given some of the additional guidance I had expected.

A reader more familiar with the region and some of the historical figures, the geography, etc., may have been much more satisfied with this book. I do not recommend it as an introduction to the country and its development.

Finally, an English-language history of Croatia written by a qualified, dedicated and objective historian. After reading (or, more often, skimming through) the numerous pamphlets and "overviews" of Croatian history written in English by various journalists, political scientists, pseudo-historians and assorted propagandists over the years, Goldstein's book is almost like manna from heaven. The book is a comprehensive short survey of the history of the Croats and their territory from the earliest times to the present (1999). Goldstein places the most emphasis on the twentieth century, however, since he intended this book for foreign readers, who he correctly assumed are more interested in recent history and the background to the current events so extensively covered in the news over the last decade. This is actually ironic, since Goldstein is one of Croatia's foremost authorities on medieval history and the Byzantine Empire. Indeed, his chapters on medieval and early modern Croatian history are probably the best short survey of this period in Croatia in any language. This takes nothing away from the last few chapters. Goldstein's coverage of the complex events in Croatia during World War II is also very objective and-crucially-cool-headed, which all too often is not the case in Croatian and Serbian historiography on that period. Both tend to engage in often exaggerated accusations of the atrocities committed by the other side while downplaying the war crimes of their own people. Here Goldstein very frankly speaks of the regime of terror established by the Croatian Ustasha and their genocidal mass killings of Serbs, Jews and others. He is no less balanced and critical in his approach to Yugoslavia's break-up and the ensuring wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Although concise, this section of the book is very comprehensive and does more in the way of clarifying events than most of the now countless "in-depth" books on the Yugoslav wars written over the course of the last ten years. He provides a good summary of wartime events in Croatia, listing the numerous massacres and destruction caused by the Yugoslav army and Serbian forces. But he doesn't shy away from mentioning the crimes committed by Croatian forces either. Particularly interesting in the latter context is the critical treatment of the Croatian role in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the ugly war crimes committed by Croatian troops during the Croat-Muslim conflict. There is also a very earnest discussion of the myriad consequences the war and overall political events of the 1990s (i.e. the Tudjman regime) had and continue to have for Croatian society, culture and the economy. This is not just an excellent book for foreign readers; it's also the type of popular historiography greatly needed in Croatia itself, for only such frank appraisals of past events can initiate the "exorcism" of the nationalist pathology which has so infected Croatia's public life (this also applies to Serbia, Bosnia, etc.). Perhaps my only criticism of the book would be the occasional awkwardness and unclarities in the translation, and the often careless proofreading. Otherwise, this book deserves only the highest praise.

It was in the fourth century, when the Roman empire split into East and West, with the boundary between the two new empires stretching from the Montenegrin coast up the river Drina to the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, and then further north. This boundary division was to remain unchanged for 1,500 years and be the line where the European Catholic West met the Byzantine Orthodox East. While there were (and still are) ethnic similarities between the peoples on the two sides of the divide, both their culture and history differ fundamentally. The Croats and Croatia on the western side are traditionally linked with Hungary, Italy, German and Western Europe, and are influenced by their long Mediterranean coastline. Ivo Goldstein is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Zagreb and a former Director of the Institute for Croatian History of the University of Zagreb. In Croatia: A History, Professor Goldstein presents a welcome and scholarly history providing an invaluable, authoritative view of Croatian culture and national character, both in its own terms and in relation to it's immediate neighbors.

I was glad to read this book and given the negative comments from (unsurpisingly) a Croatian reviewer, I can see why Croats and Serbs never get along. Rarely do I meet Croats or Serbs who go beyond being apologists for their respective nations when talking about Serbo-Croatian relations.

Goldstein, however, examines Croatian history quite fairly for the most part and more to the point doesn't fall into the trap of placing Croats on a higher plane than neighbouring Serbs. It is satifying to read something by a historian who doesn't sink to the level of a chauvanist as many intellectuals from the Balkans do.

His chapter on Croatia's meddling/warring in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995 is illuminating and reminds me that most Croats hardly deserve the "angels' halos" that they still crave when trying to "discuss" (read: justify) their conduct towards their neighbours. In addition, it is indeed refreshing to see that Goldstein pulls no punches in presenting less attractive aspects of President Tudjman's rule in spite of Tudjman's suitability in countering the aggresive nationalism emnating from President Milosevic's office in Belgrade.

Nevertheless, I agree with the reviewer who dislikes the dominance of coverage about the 20th century. Goldstein doesn't go into as much detail about the earlier periods which forced me to consult books about Hungarian, Ottoman or Venetian history when I wanted to get some more information about Croatian history during the Middle Ages and Renaissance (when Croats were ruled by those powers).

Bottom line: This book is as good as it gets for Croatian history for now. It's too bad that I haven't come across a similar work on Serbian history. Like the Croats, I'm sure that the Serbs are unjustified in trying to portray themselves as eternal victims who must take revenge for past defeats and real/imagined injustices. Goldstein's work should be a good kick-in-the-rear for qualified Croatian and Serbian historians to be brave enough not to let their thinking be coloured by prejudices about Croatian impudence or Serbian aggresion. They must begin crowding out the field of Croatian and Serbian historigraphy which is currently littered with works by journalists and other non-historians whose works provide fodder for propagandists and chauvanists.

Ivo Goldstein's book Croatia is an enjoyable and comprehensive introduction to the history of this Balkan nation. Goldstein's work also thankfully lacks the usual histrionic nationalist polemics that frequently mar the historical works from partisans of all sides of the former Yugoslavia. Recommended.

I was amazed that a mass market book like this would really expect me to swallow some of these nationalist whoppers. This book is fairly well written, and accurate up to a point, but whenever something good happens, it's the Croats. When something bad happens it's a brief paragraph blaming the Germans, or the Serbs, or the Hungarians. Ivo and Nikolina gloss over Croatia's shameful history during World War Two and have it play the victim in the Bosnian War. Take with a chunk of salt. Still, this isn't just a propaganda piece, and if you paired it with Noel Malcom's "Bosnia" and an informed and sympathetic work on Serbia, you could average them out to something good.

Ivo Goldstein's Croatia, A History, traces the evolution of modern day Croatia and its people, religions and cultures from antiquity. Today, after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Croatia remains surrounded by Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia Herzegovina, and Montenegro. Over the centuries, there have been many changes in area names and ownership, which the author traces with care.

This book about Croatia was authored by a Croatian in the Croatian language - which lens a certain degree of apparent accuracy. However, a bit of the elegance of the Croatian language was inescapably lost in the translation to English, making the rating of the book three stars.

This book is a fine example of prejudiced & politically correct mind/morals-rottening diatribe against Croat "nationalism" (the central stigma for "liberal" kowtowing/alterocentric historical revisionists thinly disguised as professionals in the field). one thing cannot be dissected in full measure, because it lies beyond the scope of the book. And this is that Ivo Goldstein is a PC historian (PhD and all that jazz notwithstanding), a product of socialist revisionism that sought to curb all "nationalisms" by falsifying many facets of national histories. Goldstein is a product of this Marxist reductionism that coalesced with newer political correctness (after the collapse of Communism) in joint diatribes against that "malign nationalists who prevent the materialization ( a la Sai Baba, I guess) of liberal pigsty paradise".

Also, it is completely in line both with Goldstein's previous work on medieval Croatian history (a book and numerous articles), where he expounds his own "shrinking" and minimalist version of Croatian medievalistics (hopelessly wandering in the desert left by his former mentor, a self-appointed iconoclastic historian Nada Klaic (although he has gone far beyond her; he's elevated her quirky iconoclasm to Croatian hamartiology):

--Goldstein's previous work consists of a book (Hrvatska povijest ranog srednjeg vijeka/Croatian history in early Middle Ages) and numerous articles. They all show similar traits:

a) reductionsim ( Goldstein's misusage of early historical chronicles (Byzantine, Venetian, Frankish) is legendary). His mentor's (Nada Klaic) works had blundered this way, but not so radically. More- his pseudoscholium is based on free distortions of historical sources ("hey- this fits. I'll take it. Hmm. And-*this* must be wrong, some kind of mistake since it gives a mental fodder to nasty nationalists. Hence- I'll ignore this manuscript (Byzantine, Arabic, Venetian) altogether") without a clear argumentation- just pompous pronouncements). For instance, much more equipped historians like Stanko Guldescu, Ivo Peric, Tomislav Raukar etc. are in direct collision with his "findings". He hilariously chopped Croatia's territorry in 9th/10th century by more than 30-40%, with no argumentation whatsoever save a few dismissive remarks.

b) he consciously ignored some "unpleasant" facts about early Croat architecture ( complexities with Stonehengean astronomic resonances) and minimalized the worth of Croatian Renaissance and Baroque literaure (which is the best literary output of any Slavic nation in that period ( add the Danish or Dutch lit, for that matter)), although it lags behind masterworks of Renaissance Spain, France or England.

c) even as a medievalist Goldstein flunked. As a national history surveyor, his short book is a case of heavy misreading serving, as has been said, the new revisionism which tries to rewrite last 10 (or so) ex-Yu history as a sort of mixture of nationalist hysterics heydey and redistribution of "guilt" (not entirely- he knows some things are too transparent). His "treatment" of president Tudjman and his political maneuvres whereby Croatia acquired her independence virtually against the majority of "int. players" is instigated by his vitriolic hatred of all things Croatian that have even an angstromsize connection with the fallen Independent State of Croatia (NDH). Hell- he's always preferred Yu integrations. Under the guise of impartiality Goldstein sells his own agenda: good (but misinformed) internatonales, bad provincial Balkan chauvinists, ..... Just another pamphlet disguised as a history. Read Ivo Peric, Stjepan Antoljak "A Survey of Croatian History" or Marcus Tanner if you want something more reliable. In this case- academic credentials are just a smokescreen.

This book devoted half of its content to events between 1941 and 1999. Pre-modern history of Croatia is very superficial dealt with. Modern history is biased revealing too often personal stand of the author. Although the author is not a Croatian nationalist his description of some events is unacceptable for objective historian. For example, he calls Operation Storm as "liberation operation" not explaining how can liberation results in the flight of population before the army that "liberated" some area. His critical description of Tudjman's government is also a reflection of his personal political views and not an objective assessment of historian.