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Through Writers' Eyes
Croatia
A combination of accounts by famous travelers, this collection brings together for the first time, stories from the war, crusader knights, and hauntingly macabre traditional tales.
250 pages, Paperback
First published January 15, 2007
212 people want to read
About the author
Peter Frankopan
14 books1,586 followersPeter Frankopan studied History at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was Foundation Scholar, Schiff Scholar and won the History Prize in 1993, when he took an outstanding first class degree. He did his D.Phil (Ph.D) at Corpus Christi College, where he was elected to a Senior Scholarship before moving to Worcester College as Junior Research Fellow in 1997. He has been Senior Research Fellow since 2000 and is Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research at Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Royal Asiatic Society.
Peter has held visiting Fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard) and Princeton, and has lectured at universities all over the world including Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, NYU, Notre Dame, King's London and The Institute of Historical Research. He writes regularly for the national and international press about current affairs and about how history helps to explain the present. His work has been translated into twelve languages.
Peter chairs a collection of family businesses in the UK, France, Croatia and the Netherlands, including A Curious Group of Hotels which he set up with his wife Jessica in 1999.
He is actively involved with several charities, mainly in the areas of education, international development, gender studies and classical music. Both he and Jessica are Companions of the Guild of Benefactors at Cambridge University. He has been a Governor of Wellington College since 2006.
He chairs the Frankopan Fund, which has awarded more than a hundred scholarships and awards to outstanding young scholars from Croatia to study at leading academic institutions in the UK, USA and Europe.
A chorister at Westminster Cathedral as a boy, music scholar at school and choral scholar at Cambridge, he is an accomplished musician and has recorded many albums as a singer and instrumentalist.
A keen sportsman, Peter won blues at both Oxford and Cambridge for minor sports, and represented Croatia internationally at cricket. He plays for the Authors CC, a team of writers whose members has included PG Wodehouse and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In recent years, the team has toured India and Sri Lanka, and played against the Pope's 1st XI - St Peter's CC - in England and in Rome.
In the summer of 2013, Bloomsbury published The Authors XI. A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon. It was as one of The Guardian's Books the year, and was one of Hilary Mantel's Books of the Year in the Observer.
Peter has held visiting Fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard) and Princeton, and has lectured at universities all over the world including Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, NYU, Notre Dame, King's London and The Institute of Historical Research. He writes regularly for the national and international press about current affairs and about how history helps to explain the present. His work has been translated into twelve languages.
Peter chairs a collection of family businesses in the UK, France, Croatia and the Netherlands, including A Curious Group of Hotels which he set up with his wife Jessica in 1999.
He is actively involved with several charities, mainly in the areas of education, international development, gender studies and classical music. Both he and Jessica are Companions of the Guild of Benefactors at Cambridge University. He has been a Governor of Wellington College since 2006.
He chairs the Frankopan Fund, which has awarded more than a hundred scholarships and awards to outstanding young scholars from Croatia to study at leading academic institutions in the UK, USA and Europe.
A chorister at Westminster Cathedral as a boy, music scholar at school and choral scholar at Cambridge, he is an accomplished musician and has recorded many albums as a singer and instrumentalist.
A keen sportsman, Peter won blues at both Oxford and Cambridge for minor sports, and represented Croatia internationally at cricket. He plays for the Authors CC, a team of writers whose members has included PG Wodehouse and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In recent years, the team has toured India and Sri Lanka, and played against the Pope's 1st XI - St Peter's CC - in England and in Rome.
In the summer of 2013, Bloomsbury published The Authors XI. A Season of English Cricket from Hackney to Hambledon. It was as one of The Guardian's Books the year, and was one of Hilary Mantel's Books of the Year in the Observer.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 22, 2024
3 or 3.5 stars. I expected, and wanted, to like this book a bit more than I actually did. Some of the selections really engage with Croatia and its culture & history and are a pleasure to read: In this category I would include Frankopan's introduction and the Leonard Green, Brian Hall, and Misha Glenny excerpts, for example.
However, too many of the selections don't really illuminate much about Croatia itself, and seem more like random pickings from old public-domain sources (i.e. available for free) which happen to have some slim link to Croatia. For example- Edward Gibbon on the Roman emperor Diocletian's palace; a papal letter scolding some crusaders who made a detour to sack the city now known as Zadar; and an excerpt from an obscure British novel set in Dalmatia, in which two English characters speak with each other but not with any Croatian people.
In addition, there's a heavy focus on the Dalmatian coast to the near-exclusion of interior Croatia, as well a number of distracting spelling/typographical errors, both in everyday words (e.g. "seige") and in Croatian place-names (e.g. Osijek repeatedly rendered as "Ojisek.")
All that having been said, if you find one of these excerpts boring or irrelevant you can just skip ahead to the next one; and if you are a real enthusiast either for Croatian history or for the overall Eland Publishing vibe then you probably would enjoy this book.
However, too many of the selections don't really illuminate much about Croatia itself, and seem more like random pickings from old public-domain sources (i.e. available for free) which happen to have some slim link to Croatia. For example- Edward Gibbon on the Roman emperor Diocletian's palace; a papal letter scolding some crusaders who made a detour to sack the city now known as Zadar; and an excerpt from an obscure British novel set in Dalmatia, in which two English characters speak with each other but not with any Croatian people.
In addition, there's a heavy focus on the Dalmatian coast to the near-exclusion of interior Croatia, as well a number of distracting spelling/typographical errors, both in everyday words (e.g. "seige") and in Croatian place-names (e.g. Osijek repeatedly rendered as "Ojisek.")
All that having been said, if you find one of these excerpts boring or irrelevant you can just skip ahead to the next one; and if you are a real enthusiast either for Croatian history or for the overall Eland Publishing vibe then you probably would enjoy this book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review