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Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe (Sources and Studies in World History)
by Traian Stoianovich
Product Group: Book
Publisher: M.E. Sharpe (1994-06)
ISBN: 1563240335
EAN: 9781563240331
Dewy Decimal #: 949.6
Paperback: 454 pages
SKU: T071205-3406
Condition: Very Good
Comments: Very good overall condition. Very tight binding. Book has some pen marks. Ships same day or next in a bubble mailer. Enjoy.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Encompassing the period from the Neolithic era to the troubled present, this book studies the peoples, societies and cultures of the area situated between the Adriatic Sea in the west and the Black Sea in the east, between the Alpine region and Danube basin in the north and the Aegean Sea in the south. This is not a conventional history of the Balkans. Drawing upon archaeology, anthropology, economics, psychology and linguistics as well as history, the author has attempted a "total history" that integrates as many as possible of the avenues and categories of the Balkan experience.
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Customer Reviews
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Incomplete, biased, disappointing
Rating  (2)
Date: 2001-01-26
2 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
Since the author actually studied under one of the twentieth century's great historians, Fernand Braudel, I really had high expectations of this book. Most of them were not met. Stoianovich attempts to present a "total history" of the Balkans, which means it is not restricted to any historical period, nor to any specific field of study, encompassing consideration of the economy, society, geography, biological/environmental factors, etc. for the region as a whole. The author should be commended for such an ambitious undertaking, and his wide knowledge of the relevant primary and secondary sources is quite impressive. However, the book requires quite a bit of prior knowledge on the Balkans, so it cannot be used as an introduction to the region and its history. It seems as though Stoianovich's narrower field of interest is the Balkans under Ottoman rule, as it is those parts of the text which deal with that period that provide the most coherent analysis and receive the most thoughtful consideration. Also, the entire book has a rather disjointed character, as the author often cites dizzying quantities of information on e.g. linguistic morphology or whether patterns from Neolithic times to the present without tying the threads together clearly, thus leaving the reader feeling more confused rather than informed. Nationalism, as an overriding socio-political force in the Balkans for much of the last two centuries, is dealt with in an unsatisfactory manner: Stoianovich never quite explains it in the context of the region's overall, long-term development. Although he indirectly cites Ernest Gellner's theory of nationalism as a by-product of modernization and industrialization, he fails to explain why nationalism emerged among many Balkan peoples in a decidedly pre-industrial stage of their development. Another failing is the author's rather obvious pro-Serb bias: the preponderance of examples he uses involve Serbia or the Serbs, and he tries to give various Serbian politicians, scholars, philosophers, etc. a wider significance than they actually merit. In his discussion of Yugoslavia's collapse and the ensuing wars in the early 1990s, this line of thought leads to a rather sad and misguided exercise in trying to assign a kind of value-based "national character" to the Serbs and Croats (suffice it to say, the Serbs are imbued with positive traits while the Croats come out as rather treacherous). For me this aspect rather sullies the entire book, which is unfortunate, since his concluding chapter contains many valid observations and warnings on the nature of global capitalism and its consequences for the natural environment. While "Balkan Worlds" has many commendable aspects, as a whole the book is disappointing and largely fails as a total history of the Balkans.
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