Anyone interested in cutting edge photographic book design should buy this book. Gilles Peress has reinvented the photographic book with this volume. Peress has an amazing composition sense unlike any other photographer working today. This book is a must see and will preserve for all time the horror of the Bosnian War.

I was absolutely amazed that this book had never been reviewed in the seven years since it came out. This is truly a magical book, one that would appeal to a broad audience. It is first and foremost a story of the author's father and the father's 15th Air Force B-24 crew, particularly of the fateful mission during which their plane, the Liberty Belle, is shot down in present-day Yugoslavia. It recounts the adventures of the Merritt crew after their rescue by Partisans, some frightening, some comical, laced with the uncertainty of the tenuous alliances formed by the different ethnic groups and their relationships with the Allies or the Axis, both, or neither. But it is much more than a story of a bomber crew that bails out in unfamiliar territory in wartime. It is also a detective story. J. Merritt decides to seek out the old members of his father's crew, using old telephone directories and contacts, and also to find out more about his father's experiences after being shot down. To do this, he tracks down people in Yugoslavia who in turn help him track down men and women who helped the young airmen after they fell out of the sky that fateful day. He writes of the searches, the meetings, and of his decision to return to the site of his father's adventures of forty-plus years ago. And this brings up the third story in this intricately-woven book. It is the story of a son's attempt to get to know his father. Together the two decide to make the trip to Yugoslavia together, and it is a journey which, one feels, will bring the two men closer. Like many fathers and sons, the relationship has been frought with reticence on both sides. The generational divide has kept the two men, who obviously love and respect each other, from forming the deeper bond of solid friendship. So 'Goodbye Liberty Belle' is much more than an aviation war story. It is a story of a search for and reconnection with the past, of tracking down young men grown old and breaking bread with them. And it is a story about a son and a father sharing an adventure that one hopes will bring them closer together. Merritt's trade is as a writer of magazine articles, and his prose has the polished, spare utility of a man comfortable with expressing himself in few words and gifted enough to chose those words well. Sections of the book are woven together cleanly--a section on the fateful day of the crash flows seamlessly into a modern-day interview with the tail gunner long assumed dead, followed by a section on the trip to Yugoslavia the father and son take in 1986. This is a triumphal piece of writing. It is all at once a great war story, a detective story, and a story of a father and son. Merritt keeps the reader wanting to know how each of the stories play out, and he does it with grace. You will love this book.

Gottschee was a German-speaking feudal domain in the royal Austrian Duchy of Carniola (Herzogtum Krain), which was founded around the year 1300. This feudal domain sat on the southern border of the Holy Roman Empire, later called the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Gottschee 1406-1627 is an authentic look into the life and government of this feudal domain on the frontier of these empires. Drawn from original source documents, and accurately translated into English from 15th century and later German, the book shows the interaction of the subjects, the ruling local nobility, and the government of the Duchy of Carniola, a duchy belonging to the Habsburg emperors. Included is interesting and seldom-seen information on farmers' petitions for redress of grievances; the system of tithes, taxes, and feudal duties; the opening of forest lands for new farms; a 1406 document granting the Gottscheer peasants unique rights not found amongst the peasants of other parts of Europe; military frontier obligations; the Habsburg system of leasing feudal domains to lesser nobles; church and pastoral affairs; and royal management of feudal properties, plus hundreds of ancient Gottscheer village and family names -- the ancestors of a distinct German linguistic group that existed there for over 650 years.

The book is fascinating reading for anyone whose ancestors come from the Gottschee region (now called Kocevje and in south central Slovenia), or who are interested in how the Habsburg emperors managed their personally-owned feudal domains in this remote frontier domain, to include the impact of the Turkish invasions.

Gottschee 1406-1627: Feudal Domain on the Frontier of Empire was beautifully translated into English by Andrew J. Witter, a professional translator, and it gives an most interesting insight into how people lived on Austria's remote frontier.

This short, but incisive book represents a decade of research by Mitja Ferenc, a leading Slovene historian, on the Gottscheer German ethnic group which occupied an area of southeastern Slovenia (a Germanic "linguistic island") for 650 years. The current book is translated by Edgar Erker into English from the dual German/Slovenian edition first published in 1993. It is the official catalogue that accompanies the permanent exhibition dedicated to the Gottscheer culture in the museum of the city of Kocevje in the present Slovenia. The book's strength is that it manages to distill a great amount of factual information related to the reasons "why" the Gottscheer lost their ancestral homeland, being first resettled by the Nazis and then finally driven out of Slovenia.

In conducting his research, the author has gone to all the major archives in Europe, as well as having visited each of the 170 or so former Gottscheer settlements at least three times--a seemingly exhaustive undertaking. Consequently, the book contains valuable information (especially in the Appendix) not found anywhere else: such as the number of houses that still exist in each of the former Gottscheer villages; the current state of preservation of what is left of churches, chapels and cemeteries; and what happened to this area under the Communists. The many before-and-after photos of the former Gottscheer villages serve to illustrate the tragedy that befell this unlucky ethnic group once Hitler invaded Yugoslavia and began to apply his various ethnic policies.

This may well be the best short book on the former Gottschee using the most up-to-date research. Mitja Ferenc, who has devoted much of his professional career as a consultant to the Slovenian Ministry of Culture to studying this unique German ethnic group, has written a remarkable work that stands as a fitting memorial to the Gottscheers whose culture had been an integral part of the history of Slovenia.

Guerrilla Radio by Matthew Collin (London Editor of "The Big Issue") is the incredible but true story of the Serbian pirate radio station B92. This was an unlicensed radio broadcast station which began in the late 1980's for the simple purpose of playing music, but it quickly evolved into become an outspoken voice against the genocidal Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. A powerful story of people's refusal to be silenced, culminating with the eventual end of Milosevic's regime in October 2000, Guerilla Radio is a strongly recommended and revealing example of the determination of human will and spirit against all efforts to shut it down, disrupt its broadcasts, and otherwise silence an underground resistance to an horrific tyranny.

Despite editorial reviews rating Ms. Blackman's account of her actions and experiences in Sarejevo to be "unfocused" and Ms. Blackman "her own personal heroine", I found her writing to be clear and concise regarding the "peacekeeping" mission and it's reception from those it was "protecting". Her personal story of the chaos and destruction of the country and it's people was informative and gripping at the same time, bringing home the reality of one woman's determination to do more than watch the horror and politics of war from her television set. Although I read her book in it's pre-edited format, her talent for telling the real story of the victims of war is obvious, and her selfless acts of giving and loving make this a book worth reading for those interested in not only the historical and religious reasons behind the conflict, but for anyone wanting to understand the psychological impact of patriotism and forced allegience on a young and idealistic generation.

This is a good approach to describe the historical matters. It looks impressivre and comprehensive.

This is an excellent book for anyone wanting to know what life was like during WWII for the everyday ethnic German. Although not widely known, the everyday German suffered at the hands of Nazi Germany. This is a compelling read of suffering and triumph of the human spirit. It is a must read for all students of WWII.

This is the story of my father, a German living in Yugoslavia during WW2. He told of horrible atrocities that noone seemed aware of in history. Father Gruber, a priest from my Father's town, tells of this story with chilling detail in a journal format. For all those Danube Schwaben and the rest of the world who acknowledge inhumanity a must read.

I've never seen a travel book quite like this one. I enjoyed the adventures and the writer's voice.