Review by Choice Review
Magas's work chronicles the disintegration of Yugoslavia through a collection of articles and dispatches published under the pseudonym Michele Lee in British left-wing periodicals from 1980 through December 1991. It also includes translations of several original documents, such as a letter from Yugoslav students protesting the treatment of ethnic Albanian prisoners jailed in Kosovo in 1981. The book demonstrates that, unlike many of the other conflicts erupting around the globe due to the end of the Cold War, ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia surfaced several years before. By focusing primarily on Kosovo, Magas provides a useful introduction to what many observers feel will be the next site of violence in the Balkans. Her orientation is intensely political. She clearly mourns the death of Yugoslavia as an integrated, multinational state; she also argues strongly in favor of Western intervention to stop Serbian atrocities (in work completed even before the Bosnian conflict began). Not meant to be an objective text, the book nonetheless provides much useful history and motivated insight. Graduate; faculty; professional. J. L. Twigg; Virginia Commonwealth University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Magas, a Croatian journalist and historian, offers some pointed, alternative perspectives on the former Yugoslavia in this compilation of her often-prescient articles, written for New Left Review and other journals. Though this is not a comprehensive or narrative history, and some articles are redundant, Magas adds to the literature of Yugoslavia by emphasizing the politics of intellectuals; she identifies the 1981 institution of martial law in the province of Kosovo as a watershed, since Serbian leftist intellectuals did not protest but rallied to nationalism. Magas criticizes intellectuals inside and outside the country for not understanding the link between uenven economic development and nationalist intolerance. Serbian nationalism, she observes, is backed by ``the only structures of the Yugoslav Communist state that managed to escape the process of democratization: the Serbian Communist Party and the Army High Command.'' The book also includes manifestos and letters from Yugoslavian organizations and from Yugoslavians outside the country. Magas's writings show that at least some observers were warning of chaos long before it erupted. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
So significant an event as the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia and the ensuing war will surely be a matter of controversial interpretation. The strength of this book lies in its rich detail and the author's social democratic viewpoint. Accounts of miners' strikes and their brutal repression in Labin (Croatia) and Trepca (Kosovo) are exemplary of the regime's loss of legitimacy. Magas's emphasis on the ``watershed'' of the 1981 Kosovo insurgency and the ``strategy of destabilizing'' the federation undertaken by Serbia's Milosevic are consistent with the opinion of many. However, less satisfactory are Magas's relative neglect of republics other than Serbia and the episodic quality of chapters written over more than a decade. This upper-level book will be of greatest value to other scholars and to those already familiar with the area. Recommended for academic libraries. See also Misha Glenny's The Fall of Yugoslavia and Mark Thompson's A Paper House, reviewed above.--Ed.-- Zachery T. Irwin, Pennsylvania State Univ.-Erie (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
