Customer Reviews

The Serbs (The Peoples of Europe)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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This is a good book for someone who want to start exploring a history of Serbs, and gives you a basic information about people, culture and political and social history. For others this is a book you realy need for personal library.

This book was written as overview of history of Serbs, it is not intended as ultimate word on it. And that was clearly stated in it as well. Author is a great historian Sima Cirkovic, who died last year. Highly recommended if you are interested to understand Serbs.

This was a pretty good book. The only issue I have is that it does not read as easy as I would have liked. I wish the author would explain more about the individuals and events that happened. It seems to me that the author expects the reader to have some sort of base of knowledge about the Serbs and Balkans before reading this book. I recommend it to those who are interested in learning about the Serbs but I also recommend doing research on each item that is brought up through the book to get a better understanding.

The Serbs have been the victims of terribe crimes for the last 600 years. An independent Slavic people they were brought under Ottoman colonialism after the battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389. They suffered enslavement and Ottoman slave raids as well as the barbarism of the Jannisaries who abducted Serb women and children. After 1804 they began to fight for their freedom from this colonialism. That freedom was snuffed out in 1914 by an Austro-German invasion during the First World War. Serbia survived and was amalgamated into Yugoslavia. In 1941 it was again carved up and the Croatian/Ustache-Nazi genocide killed 10% of the Serbian people. Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo, Slovenia and Croatia. After the war the country fell under the Communist yoke. In the 1990s the western powers and their Islamist and Croat allies conspired to dismember the rest of Serbia, slicing off Bosnia and then Kosovo and Montenegro. But the Serbian people survive, a testament to their tenacious instincts and fighting ability. Like the Armenians they are one of the tragic peoples of history, forgotten and abused.

I read couple of pages of this book still need to read the entire or been reading different sections of the book some very informative information which I did not find or know about before.