Slovenia Books

The Fall of Yugoslavia

Misha Glenny

Amazon Price: $14.86 List Price: $14.86 Usually ships in 2 to 3 weeks By: Penguin Books Ltd Amazon Marketplace: 15 new & used starting at $9.70

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Not a good book...at all 1 out of 5 stars.
6 of 16 people found this review helpful.

I was looking for an overview of the balkan conflict. This book does not offer that. It does not give someone without a great deal of prior knowledge a good historical reference for what led to war. I feel like the author of this book assumes the reader is extremely familiar with the conflict and decided to write a book sharing some of his personal experiences that coincided with major events in the conflict. The chapters severely lack coordination. As somebody else mentions it goes into way too much detail about insignificant figures. I also purchased "Yugoslavia, Death of a Nation". Though I've only finished the introduction and first chapter I already feel like I've learned more than after completion of "The Fall of Yugoslavia". Maybe after completing "Death of a Nation" going back through "The Fall of Yugoslavia" might be interesting, doubt it though...

Editorial Review:

Misha Glenny's acclaimed account of the war in former Yugoslavia contains substantial new material that discusses the end of the five-year conflict and looks ahead to an uneasy future in this turbulent region. Writing in the "Evening Standard", Fitzroy Maclean said 'Misha Glenny's deeply disturbing book is, to my mind, essential reading for anyone trying to understand, or even just follow, events in what was once Yugoslavia'.

Of Whom the World Was Not Worthy

Marie Chapian

List Price: $9.99 By: Bethany House Pub Amazon Marketplace: 12 new & used starting at $9.10

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"We must believe with all our hearts and souls that He is with us. He is a God of love!" So shouted Jakob, the evangelist, as the German tanks roared across Yugoslavian soil, and machine guns, motorcycles and Messerschmitts screamed in the hills.

Out of the sky came the Stukas. They nosed over, dropped their bombs and veered off into the cold blue. The wagon in front of them was hit. The donkey was dead, and the driver lay mutilated in the brush at the side of the road.

"This is war," said the gray-clad officer. "The only place you will be safe is in the grave."

Weak and divided, the Yugoslavians fought back. Their ill-equipped guerrillas chewed on the German army like vermin on the flanks of a stallion. They cut phone lines, laid mines, dynamited bridges and blew up armored cars. Their stubborn war cry was, "Better grave than slave!" But, for every German they killed a hundred Yugoslavs were shot in retaliation.

In the midst of this living hell, Jakob, Jozeca and other believers clung to God and prayed for both friend and foe. The enemies of their beloved homeland could burn their cities and towns, but they could not destroy their souls or quench their indomitable spirits.

Marie Chapian went to Yugoslavia and interviewed peasants, gypsies, factory workers, doctors, laborers, and officials of the Communist party. She wanted to know how the Christians' faith was sustained through those terrible years of war, famine and cold. She learned that they had simply clung to God with an almost incredible fait

Slovenia, 1945: Memories of Death and Survival after World War II

John Corsellis, Marcus Ferrar

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The Greatest Massacre after WWI in Europe 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

John Corsellis & Marcus Ferrar,
Slovenia 1945; Memories of Death and Survival after World War II

The authors disprove that the worst and greatest massacres in Europe, committed after the WW II happened in Srebrenica, where in April 1993 Serbs killed 7 to 8 thousand Bosnians. Indeed the greatest massacres happened in May and June 1945 in Slovenia, which was one of the six republics of Yugoslavia until 1991, when this common state fell apart. Slovenia, with just about 2 million citizens and 20.256 sq. km, is wedged between north-eastern Italy and southern Austria. On this, small territory 513 mass graves, with some 200,000 victims have been discovered (as per January 2007). Very few of these victims were real traitors or war criminals. Most of them were just opposing the communist revolution, which started after June 22, 1941, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Initially the Communists did not disclose their real objectives - to seize power after the war. They acted under the disguise of struggle against the Germans, Italians and Hungarians, who had occupied Yugoslavia two months earlier. But their real intentions soon became apparent, when they began killing honest and patriotic Slovenes, just because they were opposing communism. Besides some sabotage, or killing a few enemy soldiers, the actions of partisans in the Liberation Front (OF) too often caused more harm to the local population than to their enemy. In their reprisals against the nearby village populations, the German and Italian occupiers killed hostages, or sometimes the entire adult male population, sent the rest to a concentration camp, and burned down the whole village. After almost a year of this kind of suffering, the Slovenian population, supported by the Catholic Church asked the occupiers for arms, to defend themselves against the Communist partisans. When they got the arms they formed the "Village Guards", later renamed to "Home Guards" (Domobranci) and this meant the beginning of a civil war, with many crimes and victims on both sides. Though the partisans kept attacking the occupiers, it appeared that the struggle against the foreign intruders became of secondary importance.

Most of the 200,000 victims were from other parts of Yugoslavia; they were running from communism toward Austria when the war was approaching the end. The authors have focused their narrative to about 18,000 Slovenes: the members of "Home Guards" and their families, who at that time represented about 1 % of the Slovenian population. They at first managed to escape over the Karavanke Mountains, to obtain refuge with the English troops in Viktring, Bleiburg and other southern Austrian towns. But by the middle of May 1945 the English had send them and their families back to Yugoslavia, where the majority of those 12,000 returned, including women and children were murdered in an exceptionally cruel way. There was no court procedure. The bodies of those killed were buried in tank trenches and dumped into abandoned mines or numerous Carst caves in south-west Slovenia. Those who did not manage to escape before the end of the war, or who did not even try to, because they were drafted into "Home Guards", were arrested and their fate was just the same. To a lesser extent the killing, which affected also many rich people, proceeded far into 1946. So the total death toll of the Slovenes murdered after the war is some 18,000 to 25,000. Since their graves were kept secret for 45 years of the Communist reign, their exact number will never be known.

The remaining 6,000 Slovenes in Austria eventually got their refuge in Argentina, where President Juan Peron had received them as one. After 1991, when the communist system was abandoned in Slovenia, many of them - or their children - returned, being surprised that the monuments of those, who were guilty of their ordeal, still stand; once omnipotent revolutionaries - now just liberators. It will take much time, before the former Communists, who skillfully turned themselves to capitalists, will definitely loose their power.

Since the book was written by two Englishmen, their narrative is impartial. So this work is recommended to anyone, who is looking for an unbiased report of the events, which happened here, right after the war. As a Quaker and humanitarian worker of the English troops in Viktring, the first author has direct experience with the people who were returned to Yugoslavia and those lucky ones who remained in Austria.

The reviewer has first hand experience of the Italian concentration camps in Gonars and Treviso. Being drafted into signal troops after the war, he saw how inhumanly the troops, who were returned, and the members of their families, were being treated after their arrival in Slovenia.

Peter Staric, PhD, BSEE,
Ljubljana, Slovenia

Editorial Review:

In 1945 Slovenia, 6,000 civilians and 12,000 members of the anti-Communist Home Guard, the "domobranci", fearing punishment for their wartime resistance to their Partisan enemies, fled to southern Austria. But there, the British 8th Army loaded them into trucks, purportedly to take them to Italy, only to deliver them straight back to Tito's Partisans. The Partisans tortured and then executed them. The remaining civilians were spared due to the brave revolt of the British Red Cross and Quaker aid workers. John Corsellis witnessed and took part in these protests and in this book reconstructs the survivors' stories. These are vivid tales of wartime cruelty, of the revival of battered communities in refugee camps, and of emigration to Argentina, the U.S., Canada and Britain. In this unique volume, the authors call on more than half a century of research and an unsurpassed knowledge of the Slovene migrant communities around the world to tell their stories.

Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK (Short Circuits)

Alexei Monroe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

NSK is considered by many to be the last true avant-garde of the twentieth century and the most consistently challenging artistic force in Eastern Europe today. The acronym refers to Neue Slowenische Kunst, a Slovene collective that emerged in the wake of Tito's death and was shaped by the breakup of Yugoslavia. Its complex and disturbing work—in fields including experimental music and theater, painting, philosophy, writing, performance, and design—has an international following but a powerful and specific cultural context. Within the NSK organization are a number of divisions, the best-known of which is Laibach, an alternative music group known for its blending of popular culture with subversive politics, high art with underground provocation—reflecting the political and cultural chaos of its time.

In Interrogation Machine, Alexei Monroe offers the first critical appraisal of the entire NSK phenomenon, from its elaborate organizational structure and its internal logics to its controversial public actions. The result is a fascinating portrait not only of NSK but of the complex political and cultural context within which it operates. Monroe analyzes the paradoxes, perplexities, and traumas of NSK's work at its deepest levels. His investigation of the relationships between conceptual content, stylistic method, and ideological subtext demonstrates the relevance of NSK in general and Laibach in particular to current debates about culture, power, war, politics, globalization, the marketplace, and life itself. As Slavoj Zizek writes in his foreword, "Today, the lesson of Laibach is more pertinent than ever."

Monroe uses a variety of theoretical and historical approaches, as is appropriate to the shifting and elusive nature of his subject. The use of theory reflects NSK's own theoretical engagement; it is also a valuable way to read the issues raised by the work. Neither oversimplifying nor uncritically mystifying, Monroe leaves intact the "gaps, contradictions, and shadows" inherent in his subject, demonstrating that "it should still be possible to appreciate the work as art that moves, confuses, agitates, or fascinates."

Conversations with Zizek (Conversations)

Slavoj Zizek, Glyn Daly

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this new book, Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly engage in a series of entertaining conversations which illustrate the originality of Žižek’s thinking on psychoanalysis, philosophy, multiculturalism, popular/cyber culture, totalitarianism, ethics and politics.

Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher who trained as a Lacanian. He is at the forefront of philosophical, political and cultural debate and is known for his theories, based largely on a Lacanian analysis, on a wide range of subjects, including globalization, cyberspace, film, music and opera. His work continues to provoke controversy and to transform the way we think about these and other issues of popular culture and politics. In conversation with Glyn Daly, Žižek elaborates on a range of topics which encompass the purpose of philosophy and psychoanalysis, the films of Stanley Kubrick, the notion of enjoyment, Marxism, de Sade, Nazism and much more.

This book will provide readers with a unique glimpse at Žižeks humour and character, and is an ideal introduction to his work. At the same time it offers new material and fresh perspectives, which will be of interest to followers of his writings, appealing to the general reader as well as to undergraduates and graduates studying social theory, cultural studies and politics.

Pilgrim Among the Shadows/a Memoir (A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book)

Boris Pahor

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Awfully hard to read 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I am reading "Pilgrim Among the Shadows" by Boris Pahor (Orlando, FL, 1995, Harcourt Brace & Co.), a translation by Michael Biggins from the Slovenian of "Nekropola." It appears to be the only work by Pahor to have been translated into English.

Pahor's experience was in Natzweiler -- and later in Dachau. He tells the
grisly tale of how Italy persecuted the speakers of Slovenian and
Serbo-Croatian in the areas it annaxed after World War I and expanded into after the outbreak of World War II. For Pahor, a Triestino Jew barred from speaking his own language and whose main memories are of gravestones on which the names were italianized and of the main Slovenian library in Trieste being burned to the ground by blackshirted fascists, Natzweiler (he does not explain why he ended in that camp high in the Vosges mountains of France) proved that the ties among "Yugoslavs" were strong despite the signs of breakup after the death of Tito.

This is a literary memoir -- awfully hard to read with constant flashbacks
from present to past and back again -- that does flesh out some horrors.
For example, the hot water in the showers at Natzweiler came from boilers placed above the crematorium ovens (something I did not find in
Buchenwald).

Peculiarly, Pahor hardly mentions his own Jewishness.

Editorial Review:

Forty years after surviving his fourteen-month imprisonment in concentration camps, Boris Pahor, a Slovene from Trieste, visits a former camp in the Vosges mountains that has been preserved as a historical monument and suffers acute memories of the horror.

Safe Area Gorazde : The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995

Joe Sacco

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Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A landmark work of New Journalism is now available in softcover.

Safe Area Gorazde is Joe Sacco's 240-page opus about the war in the former Yugoslavia. Sacco spent four months in Bosnia in 1995-1996, immersing himself in the human side of life during wartime, researching stories rarely found in conventional news coverage. The book focuses on the Muslim enclave of Gorazde, which was besieged by Bosnian Serbs during the war. Sacco spent four weeks in Gorazde, entering before the Muslims trapped inside had access to the outside world, electricity or running water.

The hardcover edition of Safe Area Gorazde put Sacco on the map as one of the pre-eminent journalists of his time, and the softcover edition will present his work to a wider audience. The book has been prominently featured in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Time, Utne Reader, Spin, The London Times, The Washington Post, Brill's Content, several NPR programs, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly, and other media. The book also led to Sacco being named a recipient of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship. Safe Area Gorazde features an introduction by Christopher Hitchens, political columnist for The Nation and Vanity Fair.

Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture

Paul Robert Magocsi, Ivan Pop

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Editorial Review:

The Carpatho-Rusyns are central European people, numbering approximately 1.2 million, who live within the borders of five states: Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, and Hungary. They have never had a state of their own. Disregarded and suppressed by most governments that ruled over them in the past, the Rusyn people have had to fight to retain their identity, culture, and language. This work is an attempt to redress the loss of historical memory and knowledge caused by decades of repression by investigating and explaining the historical past and culture of Rusyns in all countries where they live, including immigrant communities in the United States, Canada, and Yugoslavia.

The encyclopedia contains over 1,100 alphabetically arranged entries in areas such as individuals, organizations, political parties, periodicals, historical terms, geographic regions, historical events, and on themes such as architecture, archaeology, cinema, communism, ethnography, geneaology, geography and economy, historiography, history, the internet, language, literature, nationalism, printing and publishing, and radio and television. The first encyclopedic work on Rusyns to appear in English, this book has laready proven to be an indispensable resource for European and Slavic studies specialists, and for general readers interested in international relations and nationalism.

The Revised and Expanded Edition has been fully updated: New data and references have been provided for most existing entries ans many entirely new entries have been added.

Slovenia (Biography of Nations)

Stane Stanic

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The Yugoslav Wars (1): Slovenia & Croatia 1991-95 (Elite)

Nigel Thomas

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Good military history 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Osrpey has long been the best place to go for short concise military studies with excellent maps of conflicts. This is no exception. THe second volume in a two part series on the Yugoslav wars it examines the Kosovo war andw wars in Macedonia and Bosnia. A very good study that any military history enthusiast will enjoy.

Seth J. Frantzman

Editorial Review:

Following the death of the Yugoslavian strongman President Tito in 1980, the several semi-autonomous republics and provinces that he had welded into a nation in 1945 moved inexorably towards separation. After a deceptively clean break for independence by Slovenia in 1991, the world watched a series of other wars rip through this modern European state. In this first of two volumes, experts on the Balkan region give an unprecedentedly clear, concise explanation of the Slovene, Croatian and Krajina-Serb armies of these campaigns, illustrated with rare photos and an extraordinary range of colour uniform plates.