To begin with,book of this format could hardly be suitable for fine-print bibliography of western media texts that were printed after the end of war,and in an argumentated way,rather than emotional one-that provided evidence that all fallacies used like brainwashing-detergent from some mass media houses were 100% fiction.This book is diary of alleged Serb atrocities toward Albanians,and it evokes crocodile tears."Kosovo" by William Dorich is most reccomended as a most thorough revelation of Albanian chauvinism in land where they injoyed one of highest standards of human rights,yet they had extensive history of genocidal behavior toward's non-albanians of Kosovo,with decades before curent goverment of Yugoslavia.This is propaganda book,with "heartbreaking" fallacies,that even if they were true-and they are not,as many Western observers had confirmed-are lacking the quality and quantity of Serbian's agony in Kosovo in last 300 years-after Albanians were settled there by the Turks

Dear booklovers, You people who are against the violence and terror, You who see others as themselves, As a human being and as a Kosovar I would like to assure you that Mr & Mrs Berisha wrote this book based (unfortunetaly) upon the true stories.In the best way they could they described the terror the serb "people" did to innocent Albanians (just because they were Albanians),for centuries. This book unfortunetaly is not what we call entertainment read.. It is actually educational as it was written by the blood of thousands and thousands innocent children,pregnant woman,old and usually young people... I said educational because I'm pretty sure that after reading this book you will find out that - 'If you are in dark you can at least see the stars';... With one word you will appreciate for being an American not an Albanian...because this book is true story...because we suffered so much for centuries until people like Deborah and her fellow American fellows fighted with all they possibly could to prevent serb animals killing and burning everything we had ... our loved people,our homes,our parks where we had the memories of childhood,our photographs...our everything.

It must have been difficult to write these events and tell of the atrocities that have gone on in this country. The six o'clock news only told a small portion of the slaughter that really went on. What can we do to ever prevent this from happening again? The book really provokes emotion.

This book is for the naive, those who are not intellectually curious, who are perfectly happy with the ersatz of the official U.S. government sponsored propaganda, no matter how shamelessly imperialist and biased. In brief, this book is destined to indoctrinate schoolchildren and high school pupils. Ms. Andryszewski, as proves her oeuvre, is one of those hired authors writing on various social and political issues who always shows the U.S. as the Good Daddy helping the weak, the poor and the oppressed around the world. Unfortunately, the truth is to the contrary, Uncle Sam turns out to be a bully that brings much of the world's death, suffering and destruction. Not different in Yugoslavia, Kosovo and the Balkans. There Clinton's government with his Secretary of Hate, Madeleine Albright, suddenly fell in love with the most terrorist Islamic organization in Europe, the UCK (alias KLA). But Ms. Andryszewski does not mention UCK and other Albanian criminal killing, intimidation, and other sorts of discrimination directed against the Serbs and other minorities in Kosovo taking place for several centuries, and recently intensified after Tito's death. Ms. Andryszewski does not want to see this ethnic cleansing performed by Albanians as it would not be convenient as an explanation of the U.S./NATO bombing of an independent country fighting a secessionist insurgency. Neither she mentions that this bombing was contrary to all the international laws, that it broke the United Nations charter, the NATO charter and even the U.S. constitution. When she talks about genocide she does not base her opinion on facts either. So far about 2000 victims (most of them Serb soldiers and Albanian guerrillas) were found in Kosovo despite the loud trumpeting of such a genocide by U.S. corporate mass-media before the bombing. Moreover by using the word genocide she offends the real victims of genocides, such as those of the Holocaust. Clearly Ms. Andryszewski's sympathies are on the Albanian side. When she talks about the past history of Kosovo, she places the ancient presence of both nations on more or less equal grounds. She forgets that all the historical artifacts, architecture, cemeteries, churches, art, literature and archeological excavations show and prove only the presence of the Serbs, not of the Albanians. When Ms. Andryszewski talks about the situation in Kosovo and Yugoslavia during World War II, she mostly omits the criminal collaboration of Albanians with the Nazis (for ex. the infamous SS Waffen Skanderbeg division) and their active participation in extermination of Serbs. When talking about the break-up of Yugoslavia, Ms. Andryszewski does not want to look to the roots of that development, to U.S./German sponsorship of secessionist forces, to CIA and U.S. mercenaries training of insurgents, to U.S. greenbacks and weapons constantly flowing to those forces. The Racak massacre as described in the book is blamed on the Serbs. Ms. Andryszewski does not mention the facts that put in doubt such a conclusion, that the KLA tampered with the bodies, that it was likely that the KLA staged the massacre. The Rambouillet negotiations fiasco is again the fault of much demonized Milosevic. She forgets to mention that the a priori prepared agreement contained a secret military annex demanding an occupation of whole Yugoslavia by U.S/NATO forces and in fact was an ultimatum or a new "Munich" that only traitors could sign. Ms. Andryszewski does not make a big deal out of U.S./NATO "collateral damage" (as expressed by NATO's Goebbels - Jamie Shea), i.e. of hundreds of civilians killed, of destroyed houses, hospitals, schools, churches, cemetaries, factories, TV station, bridges, trains, buses, cars, of polluted by depleted uranium and cluster bombs environment. I guess, the new master race is in its rights to kill those insects - Slavs. She is very optimistic about the present and the future despite the ongoing facts. The ethnic cleansing and murder of Kosovar minorities under the protection of KFOR proceeds unimpeded.

Ms. Andryszewski's book is a distortive and manipulative piece of propaganda trying to justify criminal actions of her government. AVOID THIS BOOK, find the truth youself!

This is, simply, a great book. And simple is the best word for it. The book doesn't skimp on facts and gives the best and most accurate overview of the history of the war in Kosovo that I have read. This book is relatively short; if you need a lot of detail I recommend "A Short History of Kosovo" by Noel Malcolm. But Malcolm's book, despite it's title, is very long and detailed. If you just want an easily read book with great photos that will leave you understanding the situation, this is it.

I have lived in Kosovo for the past 2.5 years, and during this time I have done a great deal of research on the history of Kosovo, the conflicts between the Serbs and the Albanians, what led to this war, the affects of it on people from both sides, etc. I have lived and worked among the Albanians, helping them rebuild completely destroyed homes and lives, but I have also been to many intact Serbian monasteries in Kosovo, and prayed with Serbian Orthodox Christians in their churches. I came to Kosovo immediately following the war in 1999 and saw firsthand the immense physical and emotional devastation caused by this war. I say all of this only to qualify my opinion because it is very different from the other review of this book.

I thought this book was excellent, and that it acurately explained the situations, not only in Kosovo, but also in Bosnia and Croatia, that led to the many wars the Balkans have experienced in the last few years. I found the book to be extremely unbiased. It is a very quick read and therefore somewhat limited in scope, so I would recommend Noel Malcolm's "Short History of Kosovo" for anyone seeking greater depth.

Obviously, what happened in the Balkans is a very sensitive topic for many people. But if you are looking for an short but accurate portrayal of the war in Kosovo, I highly recommend this book.

chetniks were the biggest war criminals during the WWII and during the most recent wars in former Yugoslavia.

A rare book which actually looks at all sides of a balkan conflict....one of the rare 90's books of yugoslavia which does not plainly chastize serbs... or the chetniks...a must read for anyone interseted or curious in this particular theatre of the second world war... an eye opener... a true gem

Michael Lees had a unique prespective on the wars which raged in former Yugoslavia in WWII. As a British SOE officer assigned to work with the Serbian Chetnik guerillas, he witnessed first hand their military efforts at disrupting German supply lines and in attacking large German units. He builds a convincing case, now proven by official British historians, that the British were duped by Communist moles in SOE to switch their support to Tito and his Communist Partisans - bitter foes of the Chetniks. Lees attacks what he calls the "received wisdom" which for years stated that Chetniks eventually "collaborated". In fact, Lees meticulous research of formerly classified British and American documents concludes the exact opposite. A tremendous contribution to a poorly understood theatre of World War II.

This is work written by an economist turned amateur historian. While the bibliography contains an impressive list of primary and secondary sources, the interpretations of the source material leaves a lot to be desired. In a very biased fashion, Chetniks are portrayed as chauvinists and pro-Axis collaboraters while Tito and his Partisans single-handedly battled invading fascist forces. The author makes much of his personal interviews with Tito but seems to have skipped an important question to balance this work: why did Tito sign a cease-fire agreement with the Germans, declare to them that the Chetniks were his number one enemy and proceed to wage full scale war on them and not the Nazis? ...This is academic dishonesty and "The Chetniks" should not be viewed as legitimate history but as anti-Serb ... It is worth looking at only for the bibliography and a real historian can then do a professional job of interpretating this complex situation.

Tomasevich's _The Chetniks_ is possibly the finest historical account of World War II as played out in Yugoslavia ever written in any language. The author's mastery of the primary material in several languages (Serbian/Croatian, German, Italian, English), his remarkable objectivity, and his clear presentation of very complex events have not been equaled. Stanford University Press, which is about to publish (seven years after the author's death) the second volume, dealing with the Ustashe and collaborationists, should really reprint the first volume, now not easy to obtain. A book that should not be allowed to go out of print, considering the events of the last 12 years.

Mr. Mestrovic, an ethnic croat, writes a bogus, completely biased account ofthe civil war in Bosnia. He gets plenty of assistence to bash Serbs from a Muslim co-author. He rehashs the tired Zagreb-Sarajevo party line of a "land grab" by the serbs and completely ignores the fact that Serbs made up a full 33% of Bosnia before the war. He of course, completely ignores war crimes commnitted by Croats and Muslims against Serb civilians. Also, Mestrovic ignores the role of Croatia in fomenting war amongst the croats and Muslims. A good read for any student of propaganda. A poor work if one is searching for facts.

The book is an excellent examination of the philosophical and psycho-social issues that the West now has to grapple with due to its (im)moral mishandling of the Bosnian crisis. Far from being a diatribe which serves the propaganda interests of any side, the authors explore the multiple implications that have arisen due to the loss of Western morality (or perhaps, the sham that was the West's previous pretence to morality) from various angles, and discuss not only what this means for the Bosnian themselves, but also its importance for today's Western societies.

This book represents an attempt to explore the history of the idea of Yugoslav unity and Yugoslavism as a national orientation. The author primarily examines the period between 1919, when Yugoslavia was first constituted as a country, to the early 1950s, the immediate post-WW2 period, when Yugoslavia was re-established as a socialist federation. Had Djilas actually concentrated on this period and its political and ideological developments, this would have been a much more focused and interesting book. Instead, however, Djilas often goes back to the 19th century, but his forays into this crucial period of ideological ferment are often superficial and his interpretations of certain (mainly Croatian) political movements are also sometimes questionable. When he does cover 20th century developments, such as the interwar years, he concentrates mainly on the Yugoslav communists, who were indeed the only consistently pan-Yugoslav political party at the time. However, this neglects other attempts at all-Yugoslav political organization, to say nothing of literary or cultural developments. Djilas offers little that's new in his consideration of the Yugoslav Communist Party's standpoints on the national question, a topic otherwise beaten to death by postwar Yugoslav Marxist scholars as well as non-Yugoslav scholars (most notably Paul Shoup in his still authoritative "Communism and the Yugoslav National Question"). The strongest and most interesting chapters in the book are those that deal with WW2 events in Yugoslavia, with a focus on the Ustasha terror (even though his exploration of the ideological roots of this Croatian quasi-fascist movement leaves much to be desired) and the political problems faced by the Yugoslav government-in-exile in London. The last chapter, which deals with the various attempts by the postwar communist government to forge a supranational Yugoslav patriotism (if not actual national identity) is also quite useful and enlightening.

THIS FASCINATING book is a case study of policies on nation. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) consistently, and mistakenly, recognised no less than six South Slav 'nations' as constituting Yugoslavia. These were Serbs, Montenegrins, Macedonians, Slovenes, Muslims and Croats.

Ironically, the LCY failed to recognise Yugoslavs as a nation! Further, Muslims do not constitute a nation: Islam is a religion, and no more. Serbs, Montenegrins, Bosnians and Croats are identical in ethnic and linguistic origins. Macedonians and Slovenes have their own languages, but also have the identical ethnic origin. All are South Slavs ('Yugoslavia' means the land of the South Slavs); they are all members of a nation very different in history and experience from any of its neighbours. But in the 1981 census only five per cent of the population called themselves Yugoslavs.

In 1918, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was created, from the ruins of the Habsburg Empire. In 1919, the first Yugoslav Communist Congress called for a unified Yugoslavia, and created a party. But in the mid-1920s, the party decided to recognise the right of the country's nations to self-determination and to support the creation of separate states. This meant opposing the unity of all the country's workers. (Unfortunately, there is no word in the book about the forms of trade union organisation in Yugoslavia, which would have revealed much about the practice and prospects of national unity.)

In 1935, the party demanded separate Parliaments and started to form separate communist parties. Against this, Stalin and the Comintern refused to advocate Yugoslavia's dissolution and said that the party should openly oppose separatism. They argued that only revolution could save Yugoslavia's unity.

During World War Two, the Axis powers divided Yugoslavia and proclaimed their intention never to let it reunite. They made Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina into a puppet state, and gave power to the Croat Ustashas, who massacred hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and gypsies, the worst violence in Yugoslav history. In the war, the party led the all-Yugoslav resistance movement and army, but after the war it created a federal structure for the country, which was a step backward.

The 1953 Constitution described a single Yugoslav working class, but devolution of power to the regions undercut the economic integration so vital to building a united class and nation. This decentralisation strengthened the bourgeois forces pressing first for devolution and then for separation, and hastened Yugoslavia's breakup.

In sum, the LCY was a party committed to its own breakup into separate 'national' parties, and to the nation's breakup into separate nation states. Obviously, it could not hold either itself or the country together for long.

This book illustrates the hard truth that without a nation of its own, the working class has nothing. Britain has been creating itself as a nation, by uniting England, Scotland and Wales, for over 200 years (see Linda Colley's excellent book, Britons: Forging the nation 1707-1837, Yale University Press, 1992). Yugoslavia only became united in 1918, and the LCY's policies failed to keep it so.

I found Mr.O'shea's book interesting,especially the objective parts of it; interviews,letters and case stories. Several times though the objectiveness faltered and one had to read about the author's personal views and insignificant problems for ECCM personel, compared to what the Bihac people had to live thru. Accounts of how life in Bihac town was, stories from and about local people, and their views on how life in Bosnia might have ended had the US not broken the weapons embargo, were missing.And then perhaps a subjective epilog from the author on how to survive an onslaught by an army, which is supported with men and material from the JNA.

Fighting in the Bihac Pocket of northern Bosnia pitted not only the usual antagonists against one another but also saw one Muslim warlord fight in tandem with Serbs against the regular Muslim army. The result was havoc on a scale remarkable even for the war in Bosnia. Brendan O'Shea was present as a UN military observer and uses his firsthand knowledge and special access to original sources to document the startling and terrible effects of a civil war within a civil war. O'Shea also gives us an insight into the perils of demonizing any group (read the Serbs). Like any corruption of the truth, this behavior allows other, equally reprehensible types to get away with the very same atrocities without condemnation (read the Croats). The book further reminds us that hope can come from the most bizarre quarters, especially in this most bizarre part of the world. In December 1994, at a small cafe in Plains, Georgia, a waitress with a southern drawl interrupted a group at a table. She had a long distance call for one of them, who happend to be a representative of former President Jimmy Carter. The call was from Radovan Karadzic and he was putting an offer for a cease fire on the table (literally). And the cease fire held, at least for a time. Only in the Balkans.

Since this book is a compilation of articles by a number of authors, its overall quality is necessarily unbalanced: some contributions are much better than others. Really the most interesting piece is by the book's editor, Mestrovic, who wrote the introduction (and the epilogue). In it he introduces the concepts of "postemotionalism," which roughly refers to the concept of viewing current events through the prism of emotionally-charged events, and even misconceptions, of the past. In the specific case of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, this means the widespread practice of viewing the current wars through the prism of World War II events in Yugoslavia. This, Mestrovic and several other authors imply, led to the de facto support of the Serbian side (who they view as the primary aggressors in the current wars) on the part of the international community. However, after Mestrovic's introduction, the other chapters are generally not as strong, or interesting. Those written by Philip Cohen, Norman Cigar and James Sadkovich--all dealing with the wartime events and media coverage of 1990-1992, are actually dated since their conclusions and predictions have generally been contradicted by subsequent events. The Sadkovich piece is also a bit tedious, as he meticulously details and criticizes American media coverage without offering much in the way of analysis. The text is also riddled with footnotes (of which there are 17 pages for a less than 30-page article). Since this book was published in 1996, it's surprising that the editor didn't ask the authors of these pieces to update them. Also of interest is the contribution by sociologist Slaven Letica, who reviews the development of nationalism among the Serbs during the 1980s from a psychological aspect. Despite the pretentious and jargon-filled introduction, it provides some good insight into the immediate reasons behind the conflict in Yugoslavia. All in all, the book is interesting because it offers a point of view that differs from that generally presented by the Western media, and Mestrovic's "postemotional" concept seems quite valid. However, at places the criticism of Serbian culpability is excessive, while there is also some unnecessary exculpation of Croatian actions. However, as criticism of Western, and especially American, attitudes and responses to the Balkan Wars, the book is often right on the mark.

The editor develops the theme of 'post-emotionalism' (as an alternative to post-modernism), by which he means 'the culture industry's manipulation of emotionally charged historical events'. He contributes a stimulating essay on the Orwellian misrepresentation of the Bosnian war in the West, while other contributors range more widely. Especially valuable are the important analysis of the Serbian-Croatian war by Norman Cigar, and a searching study by Igor Primoratz of the way in which the war was misrepresented in Israel.

This was a decent grouping of articles relating to the mass rapes occuring in Bosnia. Including interviews with the women themselves, as well as some of the rapists, it paints a vivid picture of these troubling events. I would have liked more analysis of the situation, specifically within the context of other wars in which rape has been a primary tool of warfare. Also, more information on where officials in Bosnia stand on this issue. This book could have been more well-rounded analytically.

Stiglmayer's useful book binds together a dozen essays on the mass rapes in Bosnian war. When it was written in 1993 the conflict still raged and disclosures of systematic government-ordered rapes primarily against Muslim women by Serbs were new and shocking to most readers. Now five years later the crimes still shock, but by their magnitude and not their novelty. This book is still a powerful witness to the rapes, but more importantly it provides a legal, psychological, and historic framework for coming to an understanding which is necessary if we are to try to prevent more such horrors in the future, or at least to provide a timely intervention and vigorous prosecution of the perpetrators.

Stiglmayer's own pair of essays are the most useful and interesting. Her first piece is an absorbing history of the Balkans that concisely untangles the web of hatreds and violence which have plagued the area for millennia and which are still powerfully germane. Her second piece constitutes the heart of the book. In it she dramatically and persuasively demonstrates that the rapes in Bosnia are not "typical" rapes, even by wartime standards, but are a tool systematically employed by the Serb leadership to pursue its genocidal campaign of "ethnic cleansing". Her interviews illustrate that the rapes are about the humiliation of women, but they are also directed at the Bosnian Muslim population as a whole as a tactical means to accomplish the evacuation by the Muslims of large swaths of Bosnian territory.

In other essays, Paul Parin offers some ideas on the psychology of the rapes. He doesn't claim to have all the answers, but his essay is thought-provoking. Rhonda Copelon provides a considered analysis of the state of international law and its applicability to the Bosnian horrors. Her otherwise sound piece is marred by her lawyerly/academic tendency to misuse words ("surface" as a transitive verb meaning "bring to light"; "intersectional" where she means "intersecting") and her occasional unlawyerly hyperbole (she notes on p.198 that a midday women's talk show opened with the script, "In Bosnia, they are raping the enemy's women". Two pages later this has turned into the assertion that the media "often refer to the mass rape in Bosnia as the rape of the 'enemy's women'").

Surprisingly, the most disappointing essays are those by the best-known authors. The first of Catharine MacKinnon's two pieces is a reprint of a 1993 Ms. Magazine article. She gets in some obligatory feminist chops, pokes at Gloria Steinem, equates the Third Reich with Penthouse, and moans about American women in porn films, in brothels, and in slavery. She slips in a couple of gratuitous anecdotes, and that's it. No analysis, no nothing. It reads as though she wrote it on a train with a short deadline and did her research by cell-phone. Her second piece is marginally better, but her point is a weak one. She is horrified by the crimes against women, yet she wants to pile every insult and irritation ever suffered by woman under the umbrella of human rights violation. In one breathless sentence (p.185) she says "...UN troops were targeting women: 'In the streets of Zagreb, UN troops often ask local women how much they cost'". Her whining about merely boorish behavior undermines her credibility and belittles the plight of women who suffered grievously in the wars. MacKinnon is exasperating, yet passionate, but ultimately her pieces fail because of her unsupported allegations and the scattered and distracting nature of her attacks on anything that pops into her head.

Similarly, Susan Brownmiller spends her essay slamming men as warrior animals. So much so that she entirely misses the point that these rapists were not beasts out of control, but were entirely under control and following their leaders' war plans to a tee. Brownmiller is not a scholar of Balkan history with any depth or understanding. She doesn't have Stiglmayer's innovative perceptions of the war. The Brownmiller piece offers no value added, it is mere filler.

Overall the book is excellent. Although, now, five years later, Stiglmayer could well give it another update, in addition to the changes she has made for this English edition. The wars have reached a precarious end, the ICTY war crimes trials are underway. There is another chapter to be added to the book, one can only hope that Stiglmayer will provide it, so that this work can remain fresh for many more years.

I read _Force 10_ before I read _Guns_, and loved them both. They're genre pieces, and there are predictable elements of plot and character, but if you take that for granted, they fulfill your expectations very well. _Force 10_ lacks the classic, simple story of _Guns_, but has a wonderful combination of humor and action, as well as a truly stunning climax. There seems to have been some revisionist history between the publication of the first book and the sequel -- Dusty Miller is inexplicably altered (for the better) from an unbelievable, constantly drawling American to an elegant and unflappable Brit (a bit reminiscent of John Steed from the Avengers). There IS a woman in this book -- not Ripley, admittedly, but she does more than look pretty and get rescued (yeah, she does that too).

I thought the original was a better book, this book seems to me to leaven on the first one too much. Overall it is a fine effort from the author, it keeps up a good pace and the facts are correct. If I had it over again I probably would have not read it and moved on to something else.

This is a great sequel to "The Guns of Navarone". Our threee original heros are back and better than ever. This book has everything, suspense,intrigue, and a nice twist at the end. If you like Maclean, you'll love this book. Defintely one of his best works.