Review by Choice Review
This is the second in a projected three-volume trilogy. The author died in 1994, though not before virtually finishing this account of the role of the occupying Axis powers and the Yugoslavs who collaborated with them. There is plenty of significance in this truly monumental work of scholarship. Tomasevich's exhaustive mining of German and Italian government documents opens a fascinating window on the wartime exploitation of Yugoslavia's economic and human resources. Just over half of the clearly and dispassionately written narrative covers Yugoslavia as a whole, with the rest proceeding region by region (though dwelling extensively on Greater Croatia). Whereas the chapters are self-contained entities that can be read separately, most of them--and the book itself--lack an adequate conclusion, aside, perhaps, from a final judgment that Yugoslavia's fate was best entrusted to a marriage of whatever convenience between Croats and Serbs. Croatia itself was neither viable nor desirable, nor even desired by the very people it so badly served. Just as the author's untimely death may explain the dearth of synthetic conclusions, it certainly excuses the absence of new research from the 1990s to supplement an otherwise exhaustive bibliography. Upper-division undergraduates and above. C. Ingrao Purdue University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
