Belgrade: Among the Serbs

By Florence Hamlish Levinsohn

Book Overview

The murderous war in Yugoslavia brings a daily round of revulsion, with the world's press fixed on the Serbs as children of darkness. "A valiant and warlike race," Churchill called the Serbs. Certainly their reputation for war has stuck. But as Florence Levinsohn finds in this penetrating look at the Balkan conflict, the Serbs are complex and often misunderstood. During an intensive stay in Belgrade, Ms. Levinsohn talked with a cross-section of Serbian intellectuals and absorbed the mood of a city enduring a draconian UN embargo. In Belgrade she unpeels the many layers of confusion, despair, cynicism, anger, and yearning felt by Serbs living under a government they neither understand nor endorse, but feel hopeless to unseat. She finds a proud people involved with a war for which they have no sympathy and only long for an end. There is, Ms. Levinsohn concludes, enough guilt in this conflict to satisfy Serbs, Croatians, and Muslims alike, and a great measure of misdirected policy in the West. As she shows, the roots of the war lie in the political exploitation of ethnic and religious hatreds by the leaders of the several groups. Belgrade is a mind-changing book about the bitterest conflict to come out of the end of the Cold War.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566630614
• ISBN13: 9781566630610
• Release Date: September 1994
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

A Peek into Belgrade

I would've titled this "A Peek into Serbia" but Levinsohn's description of life in Belgrade v. the rest of more rural Serbia was a surprise to me, as was much of the material in this book. A flowing descripteur, Levinsohn transports us to the dusty but beautiful capital of the former Yugoslavia, and allows tainted Western minds to experience the life of a passionate country and culture, one quite unlike any Americans have ever experienced on paper. The politics of the novel can get complicated, especially since the book is nearing ten years old, and the speculations as to whether or not Milosevic will go to trial in the Hague are tedious to readers, since he has already been there several months. In any case, this book was terrific, and I would recommend it to anyone looking to better understand the mentality of Serbians. Her view of Serbs as "victims with a certain victim mentality" was quite refreshing when splashed against the Western view of Serbs as the guilty party of the war in Yugoslavia and it's casualties. The most appreciated part of this book was Levinsohn's desire to get to the heart of the split of Yugoslavia, and to try to lift some of the intense blame placed on Serbians. In my eyes, she has shed some light onto the matter, more than I can say CNN ever did.

You've found the right book!

I could not stop reading this great Levinsohn's work. She got the point. I felt in love with her style of writting.