Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation is a sad and necessary book, one that still holds very well 15 years after its revised edition, which is the one I bought at amazon and read. There are problems, of course. It needed more maps to help readers unfamiliar with the terrain have a better idea of distances, geography, and communities. It needed more clarity in order to know exactly who is saying what, especially in the long quotes that the authors select to single out in self-contained paragraphs. Readers will know who the speakers are, but it could have been done differently. I liked "Burn This House" so much, that I expected many end-notes to describe in detail this or that aspect of the conflict, just like the end-notes in "Burn This House" do so well. The end-notes in "Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" are good, but they should have been more and more detailed. Also, several typos could have been avoided.
Still, this is a superb book. It takes a compassionate yet sober view of events. To those readers that may think it is too one-sided, think again. There are plenty of one-sided books on this subject that, although informative, must be taken with a grain of salt. This one, while far from perfect, gives us a devastating overview of the conflict that tore a country apart. Yes, the authors do state that there are guiltier parties and that guilt cannot be distributed equally. Yes, the guilt of the Serbs of Serbia, the Serbs of Bosnia, the Croats of Croatia and then the Croats of Bosnia, and, finally, the Muslims, in that descending order, is presented. Guilt in this crime that was the wars of Yugoslavia was not, and cannot be, spread equally. To do that would be tantamount to saying that a woman raped by one man and then a second one is as guilty as her attackers because she bit one and kicked the other in the groin. We can say that there was violence exerted by the victim against her assailants, but we cannot, in good conscience, state that all parties are equally guilty.
I have reviewed plenty of books in which the Muslims of today, as well as those of the past, are not presented in a good light, and I have agreed with those books because I think that the imperialistic, triumphant Muslims of the past, and the not so-triumphant Muslims of today deserve to be exposed to the harsh light of rational inquiry. Therefore, readers that don't know my reviews may think that I approached "Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" with a pro-Muslim bias. I did not. It's just that the Muslims of the former Yugoslavia were squeezed and pushed for a long time into extreme positions (extreme positions they did not have at the beginning) by their former neighbors, and even under the most pressing, harsh circumstances, only some Muslims resorted to pay back their tormentors with the same coin. If the Muslims of Bosnia are radicalized today (and I don't know whether they are or not), the Serbs, the Croats, and, yes, the West, are to blame for that.
Read this book and reach your own conclusions. The BBC program, based on this book, is also illustrative. You won't find "neutrality" here because, when everything has been said and done, to be absolutely neutral would be to ignore one side's desperate plight in benefit of those who started and continued the crimes. Yes, those most responsible for the crimes and the violence also made their own peoples suffer, particularly Milosevic in Serbia proper and the duo Karadjic-Mladic in Srpska. And later the Serbs in both areas were bombed by NATO. None of those facts erases the previous fact that the Serbian leaders, with the almost total support of their peoples, waged war on their neighbors secure in the hardware of the Yugoslavian Army and knowing that those neighbors could not defend themselves adequately. When the neighbors eventually hit back, the Serbs cried foul.
A good and necessary volume, to be read with others, like "Unholy Alliance," and "Burn This House." Also, Osprey has a slim, well-illustrated tome on the wars of Yugoslavia that makes a great complement to these titles.
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- Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2012
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Top reviews from other countries
- LarissaReviewed in Brazil on March 23, 2022
Interesting read but horrendous quality
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- Mr. J. D. CarvillReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 23, 2015
New Edition has Microscopically Small Text
