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78 books
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59 voters
Balkans Books
Showing 1-50 of 3,530
The Bridge on the Drina (Bosnian Trilogy, #1)
by (shelved 186 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.33 — 26,247 ratings — published 1945
Balkan Ghosts (Paperback)
by (shelved 134 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.91 — 6,027 ratings — published 1993
The Tiger's Wife (Hardcover)
by (shelved 132 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.42 — 103,226 ratings — published 2011
The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers 1804 - 1999 (Paperback)
by (shelved 129 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.15 — 2,405 ratings — published 1999
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Paperback)
by (shelved 116 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.21 — 2,756 ratings — published 1941
The Balkans: A Short History (Paperback)
by (shelved 97 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.75 — 3,016 ratings — published 2000
The Cellist of Sarajevo (Hardcover)
by (shelved 74 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.00 — 45,062 ratings — published 2008
Girl at War (Hardcover)
by (shelved 60 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.02 — 34,542 ratings — published 2015
The Fall of Yugoslavia (Paperback)
by (shelved 60 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.84 — 1,477 ratings — published 1992
Imagining the Balkans (Paperback)
by (shelved 59 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.07 — 599 ratings — published 1997
Death and the Dervish (Paperback)
by (shelved 57 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.51 — 11,451 ratings — published 1966
Broken April (Paperback)
by (shelved 49 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.00 — 9,061 ratings — published 1978
Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History (Hardcover)
by (shelved 48 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.31 — 28,568 ratings — published 2021
Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood (Hardcover)
by (shelved 48 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.28 — 2,753 ratings — published 1996
Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (Paperback)
by (shelved 46 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.38 — 1,610 ratings — published 1996
The Ministry of Pain (Paperback)
by (shelved 45 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.82 — 2,716 ratings — published 2004
They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague (Paperback)
by (shelved 45 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.21 — 2,485 ratings — published 2003
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Paperback)
by (shelved 43 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.12 — 3,713 ratings — published 1976
Sarajevo Marlboro (Paperback)
by (shelved 41 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.14 — 5,141 ratings — published 1994
Bosnian Chronicle (Bosnian Trilogy, #2)
by (shelved 40 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.26 — 2,784 ratings — published 1945
The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia (Paperback)
by (shelved 40 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.12 — 416 ratings — published 1994
Bosnia: A Short History (Paperback)
by (shelved 40 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.10 — 836 ratings — published 1994
Café Europa: Life After Communism (Paperback)
by (shelved 39 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.95 — 3,204 ratings — published 1996
Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992-1995 (Paperback)
by (shelved 35 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.30 — 10,895 ratings — published 2000
The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Yale Nota Bene)
by (shelved 35 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.82 — 339 ratings — published 1997
Dictionary of the Khazars (Paperback)
by (shelved 34 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.17 — 7,812 ratings — published 1983
People of the Book (Hardcover)
by (shelved 33 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.04 — 159,331 ratings — published 2008
Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (Paperback)
by (shelved 33 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.00 — 588 ratings — published 1996
The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return (Paperback)
by (shelved 32 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.24 — 1,517 ratings — published 2014
Like Eating a Stone: Surviving the Past in Bosnia (Paperback)
by (shelved 32 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.45 — 3,355 ratings — published 2002
Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (Paperback)
by (shelved 31 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.14 — 3,402 ratings — published 2017
Kosovo: A Short History – An Essential Chronicle of the Balkans, Ethnic Tensions, and Political Independence (Paperback)
by (shelved 31 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.08 — 476 ratings — published 1998
How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (Paperback)
by (shelved 30 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.14 — 5,775 ratings — published 1991
Prokleta avlija (Hardcover)
by (shelved 29 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.24 — 11,712 ratings — published 1954
Chronicle in Stone (Hardcover)
by (shelved 29 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.08 — 4,988 ratings — published 1971
My War Gone By, I Miss It So (Paperback)
by (shelved 29 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.20 — 3,363 ratings — published 1999
Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo (Paperback)
by (shelved 27 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.77 — 12,624 ratings — published 1993
To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace (Paperback)
by (shelved 26 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.09 — 901 ratings — published 2020
The Palace of Dreams (Paperback)
by (shelved 26 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.93 — 6,901 ratings — published 1981
Elegy for Kosovo (Hardcover)
by (shelved 25 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.83 — 1,264 ratings — published 1998
The General of the Dead Army (Paperback)
by (shelved 25 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.02 — 5,641 ratings — published 1963
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (Hardcover)
by (shelved 25 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.99 — 2,956 ratings — published 2006
Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus (Vintage Departures)
by (shelved 23 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.05 — 1,769 ratings — published 2000
The Fortress (Paperback)
by (shelved 23 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.66 — 6,497 ratings — published 1970
Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950 (Paperback)
by (shelved 23 times as balkans)
avg rating 4.33 — 1,590 ratings — published 2004
With Their Backs to the World: Portraits from Serbia (Paperback)
by (shelved 23 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.85 — 1,030 ratings — published 2000
Catch the Rabbit (Hardcover)
by (shelved 22 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.87 — 8,570 ratings — published 2018
Bolla (Hardcover)
by (shelved 22 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.96 — 10,688 ratings — published 2019
The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans – A Journey Into War, Chaos, and Violence in a Beautiful Region on the Brink (Paperback)
by (shelved 22 times as balkans)
avg rating 3.61 — 493 ratings — published 1999
“The neo-cons, or some of them, decided that they would back Clinton when he belatedly decided for Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic, and this even though they loathed Clinton, because the battle against religious and ethnic dictatorship in the Balkans took precedence. This, by the way, was partly a battle to save Muslims from Catholic and Christian Orthodox killers. That impressed me. The neo-cons also took the view, quite early on, that coexistence with Saddam Hussein was impossible as well as undesirable. They were dead right about that. They had furthermore been thinking about the menace of jihadism when most people were half-asleep.
And then I have to say that I was rather struck by the way that the Weekly Standard and its associated voices took the decision to get rid of Trent Lott earlier this year, thus removing an embarrassment as well as a disgrace from the political scene. And their arguments were on points of principle, not 'perception.' I liked their ruthlessness here, and their seriousness, at a time when much of the liberal Left is not even seriously wrong, but frivolously wrong, and babbles without any sense of responsibility. (I mean, have you read their sub-Brechtian stuff on Halliburton....?) And revolution from above, in some states and cases, is—as I wrote in my book A Long Short War—often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.”
― Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
And then I have to say that I was rather struck by the way that the Weekly Standard and its associated voices took the decision to get rid of Trent Lott earlier this year, thus removing an embarrassment as well as a disgrace from the political scene. And their arguments were on points of principle, not 'perception.' I liked their ruthlessness here, and their seriousness, at a time when much of the liberal Left is not even seriously wrong, but frivolously wrong, and babbles without any sense of responsibility. (I mean, have you read their sub-Brechtian stuff on Halliburton....?) And revolution from above, in some states and cases, is—as I wrote in my book A Long Short War—often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.”
― Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
“A Mall and Bullet Holes"
While walking in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
a country devastated and drained
by the wars of the global elite,
exactly like mine,
I arrived at an intersection and noticed a huge mall on the right side…
On the left side, there was
an old residential building filled with bullet holes
that looked like eyewitnesses
to all the free death that took place here
in a war that has since ended,
yet its real causes and the criminals behind it
are still lurking in every corner,
like infected pus ready to burst
at any moment of awareness…
I wondered bitterly:
When will the world understand
that violence never erupts inadvertently,
that all violence in our times is premeditated and agreed upon
by a small elite that decides in advance
that any nation that rejects malls, consumption, and superficiality,
must be disciplined with free death for those who resist!
It is also agreed upon – and it all costs – that
the minds and souls of all survivors
must permanently be pierced with bullet holes!
In the same intersection, I observed a redhaired elderly woman
with sorrowful eyes deep as bullet holes…
I then saw a group of youth wearing modern clothes,
like those we see in malls…
The elderly woman looked at them as if
wishing to tell them about all that happened here,
but they didn’t notice her existence
for their eyes were fixated on their phones…
I painfully wondered then:
Has anyone told them about what happened here?
Can they distinguish the sounds of bombs from those of fireworks?
Has this elderly woman, who looked broken and brokenhearted,
told them about the real price she’d paid
with all the holes left in her heart and her history
for the sake of these malls and cheap consumer goods?
[Original poem published in Arabic on July 4, 2024 at ahewar.org]”
―
While walking in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
a country devastated and drained
by the wars of the global elite,
exactly like mine,
I arrived at an intersection and noticed a huge mall on the right side…
On the left side, there was
an old residential building filled with bullet holes
that looked like eyewitnesses
to all the free death that took place here
in a war that has since ended,
yet its real causes and the criminals behind it
are still lurking in every corner,
like infected pus ready to burst
at any moment of awareness…
I wondered bitterly:
When will the world understand
that violence never erupts inadvertently,
that all violence in our times is premeditated and agreed upon
by a small elite that decides in advance
that any nation that rejects malls, consumption, and superficiality,
must be disciplined with free death for those who resist!
It is also agreed upon – and it all costs – that
the minds and souls of all survivors
must permanently be pierced with bullet holes!
In the same intersection, I observed a redhaired elderly woman
with sorrowful eyes deep as bullet holes…
I then saw a group of youth wearing modern clothes,
like those we see in malls…
The elderly woman looked at them as if
wishing to tell them about all that happened here,
but they didn’t notice her existence
for their eyes were fixated on their phones…
I painfully wondered then:
Has anyone told them about what happened here?
Can they distinguish the sounds of bombs from those of fireworks?
Has this elderly woman, who looked broken and brokenhearted,
told them about the real price she’d paid
with all the holes left in her heart and her history
for the sake of these malls and cheap consumer goods?
[Original poem published in Arabic on July 4, 2024 at ahewar.org]”
―
