Customer Reviews

Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro

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

 

 

This is an excellent survey of the history of a fascinating country. It has been an irksome fact for some years that no modern, scholarly survey of Montenegrin history has been in print. It is, for example, one of the serious shortcomings of Misha Glenny's otherwise superb "The Balkans 1804-1999" that Montenegro is almost entirely absent from his coverage. The splendid treatment given to both Bosnia and Kosovo by Noel Malcolm's books needed to be extended to the Black Mountain. And now Elizabeth Roberts has done it.

The introductory chapter is a lightning-fast overview of the history. Then she starts again in chapter 1 for a more pedestrian amble through that past. It is often an irritating feature of works of this kind that they over-concentrate on more recent periods of the past, as if only the latest news is somehow 'relevant' -- and although Roberts' book does indeed give far more space to later periods than to earlier ones (2/3rds of the work covers the time since 1774), she simply has to be forgiven for it; written records on the Middle Ages and ancient times in that backward realm are so few as to make overlengthy interpretation of them tiresome for the reader.

The book as a whole gives a very solid, satisfying, balanced and insightful view on Montenegro's history. The historiographical record to date would suggest that Roberts' book is unlikely to suffer competition for a few decades to come. But frankly, this is so good that it won't matter much.

A magisterial account which as "The Economist" says is so wide-ranging and comprehensive that no further history in English is likely to be published for a very long time. As the Spectator reviewer, Simon Sebag Montefiore, said " a wonderful book" and Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian ""A richly detailed and timely new history of Montenegro"

Popular history of the nesewst state in the world.Interesting interpretation of a selected number of secondary sources on the history of the South Slavs.