This is, at present, one of THE books (in the English language) on understanding the roots of today's headlines. Mr. Roberts takes a scholarly and refreshingly unbiased approach to the tangled history of the two rival Yugoslavian resistance movements: the monarchist and Republican Chetniks of General Drazha Mihailovich, and the communist Partisans of Josip Broz Tito. With the excellent book by Richard West titled "Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia" a reader will be much more informed than by the pedantics of Western left-wing and right-wing editorials and so-called "news reporting" of the past decade.

"The Triple Myth" is Stella Alexander's seminal 1987 biography of Croatia's World War II-era Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac. A difficult subject, as anyone familiar with Yugoslavia knows, precisely because he has been shrouded in myths for decades, myths that are rooted in the same conflicts that made the fighting of World War II and the 1991-95 wars in Yugoslavia so atrocious. "The Triple Myth" is not pro- or anti- Croat or Serb, but a careful study of a controversial figure. Alexander's Stepinac is neither saint nor monster, but a "brave man, of piety and intelligence but with a blinkered world view". Stepinac's story, and the myths it evoked, have been fundamental to the development of modern Croatia. The book was recommended to this reader by both Croat and Jewish scholars in Zagreb as the most balanced examination of his life.

The "triple myth" of the title conveys the fact that Stepinac was manipulated to a variety of ends. There was the communist myth (that he was a separatist Croat who sought to undermine Tito with allegiance to the Vatican and fascism), the Serb myth (that he was responsible for the slaughter and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Serbs), and the Croat myth (that he was a saint who championed Croatian independence and saved thousands from death at the hands of the fascists). Like all effective myths, these are blends of fact, fiction, and propaganda. They appeal to those predisposed to believe them and have metastisized into "facts" for those who still fight these battles. Thus the myths, and the prejudices that underlie them, continue to wield tremendous power.

Stepinac was born to a prosperous farming family in 1898 and was once engaged, but his fiancee called it off due to his excessive piety. He studied at the Vatican and returned to Croatia in 1931, a time of turmoil as the democratic experiment in Yugoslavia was failing and nationalists, labor unions, and Serbian royalty vied for support. Though young and reluctant, Stepinac became archbishop of Zagreb in 1937 while the Belgrade government vainly sought to balance the Orthodox Serbian church against the Catholic church in Croatia. Alexander's description of the maneuvering behind the unsigned concordat in 1937 and how it stoked Serb/Croat tensions are fascinating. Stepinac was devoted to the church and to Croatia, which he conceived as tightly linked. These passions, and his visceral hatred for communism, left him tragically myopic about broader world affairs. When the fascist Ustashe regime entered Zagreb in 1941 and declared an independent Croatia allied with Nazi Germany, Stepinac rejoiced both for Croatia's independence and for the regime's militant anti-communism, as well as the fact that they, like him, viewed the church as an integral element of Croatian identity.

The Ustashe quickly began to brutalize Serbs and Jews, organizing death camps and mass deportations to ethnically-cleanse Croatia. Some Catholic clerics participated in these atrocities, though Stepinac's role was more ambiguous. During the first year, he not only failed to object to the atrocities but suggested ways to make them more efficient. In a July 1941 letter to the government he wrote: "The measures undertaken would have their full effect if they were carried out in a more humane and considerate way". By contrast, he opposed measures targetting Jews and Serbs who had converted to Catholicism, for once they became Catholics (and thus Croats), they were members of his flock. By mid-1942, Stepinac had split with the regime, no longer believing Croatia was truly independent -it was a vassal of Nazi Germany- nor that the church benefitted from the slaughter of Serbs and Jews. Yet he was slow to denounce the regime, feeling he would be more effective if he retained some influence and remained in Zagreb, trying to "save what could be saved".

Tito's communists took power in post-war Yugoslavia, beginning a relationship of mutual distrust with Stepinac that played out over many years, as each side needed but despised the other. In his 1946 show trial Stepinac was convicted of collaborating with the Ustashe. Noting that Tito was most interested in controlling the Catholics as all other institutions, Alexander comments that there would have been no trial had Stepinac been willing to sever ties with Rome and set up an independent Croatian Catholic church. Sentenced to sixteen years in prison, he was released into house arrest in 1951. The prosecution raised some valid questions that emphasized how differently Stepinac welcomed the fascists in 1941 and the communists in 1945. Stepinac had been seduced by the fact that the fascists were Catholics. His narrow worldview, focusing only on the church and Croatian independence, blinded him to the evils of the Ustashe until too late. In 1952, Stepinac was elevated to cardinal, remaining a symbol of obstinate opposition to the communists until his death, still under house arrest, in 1960.

Stepinac's legacy is complicated. Alexander's book does not end the debate but helps us sort facts from myths. Perhaps history can be no kinder, nor more cruel, than to conclude that Stepinac was devoted to the church and to Croatia but was tragically flawed, a victim of his own naivete and narrow-mindedness. He failed to be great, and his failing at such a critical historical moment makes that failure so much more tragic.

When first published about a decade ago, Debeljak's essay was met with harsh criticism in many of the republics of the former Yugoslavia (and not just there) as being a sappy example of 'Yugo-nostalgia.' This was particularly true of Croatia and Debeljak's native Slovenia. This despite the fact that the entire first section of the book is a rather harsh condemnation of those nationalist regimes that waged the wars on Yugoslavia's ruins, and the accusations Debeljak levels at Milosevic and the Serbian nationalists who initiated the entire process (indeed, at one point he poses the question, perhaps more relevant now than when the essay was first published: "who still remembers Vukovar?"). But this is not really a lament over the country in the form that it collapsed; instead it reads more like an eloquent epitaph to the culture that once existed in Yugoslavia, and to the Yugoslavia that could have been. In this sense, he calls on all people of the former Yugoslav republics to remember the past in all its complexity, to prevent their memories from being 'ethnically cleansed' as well. Despite all of the rhetoric that followed Yugoslavia's break-up about the nature of that now-defunct state, Debeljak boldly declares that he remembers a time when things did not seem so inevitable, when conflict did not seem to be the only alternative.

This book is an examination of the people that lived in the Dalmatian hinterland of today's Croatia. It looks at the ways the people of coastal Dalmatia and the West perceived these people. Not an easy read for the average reader but well worth the read for those with a real keen interest in Croatian and Venetian history like myself.

French slavicist Paul Garde has written a superb assessment of the death of Yugoslavia in his trenchant examination titled La Vie et Mort de la Yugoslavie published in about 1993. A Balkan specialist myself, I picked it up in a Paris bookstore brought it home and and studied it carefully. At the time, it was the most insightful discussion of the complexities of multicultural Yugslabvia and the pressures and foibles that led to its demise I had seen. Putting to rest the notion of "ancient hatreds" in the Balkans, Garde doucments the first real violence and killing between Serbs and Croats to a riot in Zagreb in the early 1900s. Commenting on the manipulation of history, specifically Milosevic's denigration of Croats as not really Slavic, Garde notes a linguistic theory that the their name "Hrvat" may have come from a Persian term for these early Slavic people who migrated from the east. Garde's is a truly illuminating and readable studt that deserves translation into English.

May 19, 1999, A Village Destroyed, hundreds of Kosovars are captured in JUST ONE, OF THE KOSOVA villages, by the serbian thieves,criminals,put out of prison "people" wearing police and army uniforms - they get all their valuables then they kill all men just to burn their bodies afterwards. Luckily, two men survive the "Lightning" gang policemans" bullets as they were meant to find themselves under somebody elses body...

Shocking true stories from Kosovar victims...

Even more shocking confessions by "Lightning" gangs...showing in details what they have done in this village...Their confessions will make you play a detective and search for them in any way possible because after all their crimes against humanity they are still roaming some country's streets and of course they are considered dangerous...anti humans.

After all, the book is so informative and honest. This book is on the TRUTH's side - the so many photographs and HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH proves it. You'll finish it in one breath.

Tomasevich did a phenomenal job on a daunting subject: the political and economic history of Yugoslavia during the Second World War, focusing on Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. This massive book will be especially valuable for the chapters on economic activity in the Axis-occupied Independent State of Croatia from 1941 to 1945, material that has rarely been presented in English in such detail (over a hundred pages in the two chapters on this subject). The sections on the many religious groups of Yugoslavia are likewise comprehensive, with a great deal of new information. The bibliography is in itself a triumph of thoroughness.

What makes the book not only useful but remarkable is the author's story of how he conducted his research, interviewing contentious sources and wading through the conflicting evidence on controversial topics such as the numbers of people murdered by the several parties to the conflict (Nazis, Italian Fascists, Ustase, Chetniks, Partisans). His analysis is masterful and sensible.

My only complaint is the book's high price. I can only hope that there will be a paperback edition, as this work is too significant to go out of print.

Martin provides much need insight into this poorly understood theatre of World War II - the Balkans. Using recently declassified British intelligence documents and radio transmission transcripts from the field, Martin builds a strong case for the defense of General Draza Mihailovich, the Serbian guerilla leader who was abandoned by the British in favour of the Communist leader Tito. British field documents show that Serbian Chetnik forces carried out large scale attacks against German and Croat Nazi units up to 1944 - long after they stopped getting Allied aid. Importantly, they continued rescuing downed Allied airmen, culminating in the rescue in June, 1944 of more than 500 US and British airmen who were evacuated by US Airforce aircraft from Serbia in an operation codenamed "Halyard" - the largest rescue in US Airforce history. All round a tremendous contribution to WWII history. I might add, that just last year, more than 50 years after the fact, the official British archives have admitted that Communist moles working for SOE (Special Operations Executive) manipulated and falsified field transcripts from the Serb Chetniks thereby resulting in official British support switching to Tito. Martin's thesis has been proven correct. Nicholas Tintor Toronto

"With Stalin Against Tito" is an outstanding monograph on a crucial period in post-WW2 Yugoslav history by one of the field's preeminent historians. The Tito-Stalin split in 1948 was the first major rift to occur among the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, and its repercussions were felt in Yugoslavia, the USSR and the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe. Banac convincingly shows that although the conflict between the Yugoslav and Soviet communists assumed an ideological veneer, it was primarily a power struggle between two willful autocrats. This partially explains why the Yugoslav "Cominformists," who ended up supporting Stalin's line, were such an ideologically diverse group - from national (populist) communists to dogmatic internationalist hardliners. The only thing that united them was opposition to Tito and unquestioning loyalty (in some cases) to Stalin and the much-revered Soviet Communist Party. Banac bases his study on extensive research into this area, and it's interesting that he made use of subsequent cultural production (i.e. novels, films, plays, poetry) that deals with the Cominform crisis and its consequences for Yugoslav society as valuable source material. Banac's analysis is top-notch and his writing style is very engaging and never dull.

This book provides excellent examples and background information about the tragedy that has occurred in Bosnia and is continuing in places such as Kosovo. It also pinpoints the cause of this genocide - The Yugoslav government and the Serbs. It is absolutely necessary for anyone interested in current affairs and the conflict in Bosnia.