Vicki Nemeth’s Reviews > Croatia > Status Update

I've reached my goal for this book, which is just after World War I (what got me interested in the topic of Croatia was the possibility to read Bela Zombory-Moldovan's book after). I'm less than halfway through, but I've run out of library renewals. I hope it's still in the Winnipeg Public Library collection when I try again, because I would like to read about what went wrong with Yugoslavian education in the 1970s.

As far as the history genre goes, this has been a quick survey, probably due to a lack of the oldest source material. But with the "Development of the Middle Class," I can feel the book getting more detailed and slower. It only took 69 pages to cover over 2000 years from prehistory to 1847. But it will take 200 pages to survey the next 152 years up to 1999. Now the book is going to get hard.

When you see how little Canadians know about mainland European history...

My province wasn't very good about teaching world history, but it's paying off here. This section is told from the Zrinski point of view, and I don't have any preestablished Tsarist or Viennist biases.

Back from my pause. Whoever needed this from the library got a lot of use out of it.

Between the dark ages and the Ottomans is a very long time to survey. On some points I was confused about the transition from feudalism to the Venetian Renaissance. I think the book means that the systems coexisted? But its attention to urban history doesn't do a solid job conveying the continuation of feudalism. Less cash less sources, I guess?

Accidentally instils in me the opinion that feudalism was a consequence of lack of protections on the county system (the book doesn't say this and the language probably isn't trying to imply it). However, I never used to have the patience to read a book in this genre, so I have yet to read broadly enough to measure this idea against a lot of examples.