Rating: 
Summary: Pre-revisionist and oh, so wonderfully told
Review: Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is really a masterpiece of the "deep map" genre, which incorporates into her travel narrative the insightful retelling of Balkan history. Sadly, her bias against Austrians and Germans and her reliance on scholarship that has proved faulty in recent years undermine some of the factual side, but somehow facts aren't the only key to understanding in this case. Her narrative illustrations of the assasination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the attentat that killed King Alexander and Queen Draga in Belgrade are some of the most amazing prose written, whether you view her version as fact or fiction or somewhere in between. West is a marvelous storyteller, especially when the story -- in some form -- took place, making this worth a look, even if it's only to read through sections of specific interest.
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Summary: A treasure trove of history, geography, politics, & humanity
Review: Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, written 2 years before Hitler began changing the face of Europe, is both the record of a journey through the Balkans with her husband and, at the same time, a journey through the history of the place. The shere volume of the text (1180 pages in paperback) underscores Ms. West's attention to the detail of setting, the psychology of character, and the wit of a feminist watching the world condense into male political inanity. She captures the character as well as the picture of each State (Croatia,Dalmatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, and Montenegro). We literally travel with her through the spring snow, the beautiful countryside, the mountains, toward the religious festivals and ceremonies (Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim) she seeks with such vigor. We witness with her the conflict of past and present history, past and religion that sparks up like flint banging out fire in such tight geographic proximity-- conflict we see even today. The book is long but broken into manageable chapters; the work, plowed through from beginning to end, is exhausting-- as if we actually walked with her through each of the states, climbed each stone wall and looked over her shoulder as she rested under a tree recording in her journal everything she is about to tell us. If there is one criticism I have of the present edition it is simply that there are no maps-- I can see everywhere I go in the journey with her crisp description of place, but I was forced to go to an atlas to see where I had been. This has been called a classic of 20th Century Lit. It is an amazing tour de force. And as much as it is a journey through the history of people and place, it is also a powerful description of the mind of a woman who had eyes to see and words to help share that world with all of us. RAF
Rating: 
Summary: A walk through the Balkans-A perspective from the past
Review: Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A journey through Yugoslavia calls to mind traveler epics of candid observation through past centuries in Europe, Russia, and the Americas. Many pages are devoted to death by details, but the total canvas is a rich, detailed one of a region buffeted by the crosswinds of history. It provides an excellent foil to works such as Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and Fukuyama's End of History. Traveling by car, train and foot through many a spot that would not show up even in a Michelin guide, Mrs West paints a detailed picture of the (now former) Yugoslavia. The Austrians, Hungarians, Turks and Italians do not come off well under her historical microscope. With perhaps a bit of traditional British dislike for Napoleon, Mrs West reserves some of her harshest criticisms for Marshal Marmont and his cynical rule in Dalmatia. Written as a traveling journal in the late 1930's, the book is free of much of the angst ridden writing of today on this region. West has no clear political agenda to advance in this book; rather, she lays out a series of experiences, analyzes them, and provides them to the reader for consideration. With the advantage of hindsight, many of her ethnological observations are uncanny, especially the role that the Serbs and Croats would play in the 1940's and again in the 1990's. Her understanding, and further exploration, of the depth of religious current swirling in the valleys and plains of the Balkans is impressive. Although she appears somewhat cynical about the true depth of feeling in many instances, she nonetheless accords the importance of religion, and what I would call the "cult of martyrology" its due respect in this turbulent historical region. For someone looking for a quick, executive summary type read on the Balkans, this is not it. For someone who knows how to speed read, and extract nuggets of wisdom and keen observation, this book is a must read for the Balkans.
Rating:
Summary: A landmark achievement
Review: The legendary critic Diana Trilling, who in this edition's blurb calls it one of the best of the 20th century, gets it right. The nay-sayers here who pan it, don't. Its reputation suffers currently because Rebecca West, writing in the late 1930s, sympathized with the Serbs, whose reputation has been darkened in our time by the atrocities of Bosnia and Kosovo. I would guess most West opponents favor rival Croats or Albanians just as they claim she favors the Serbs. A Serb advocate might point out that Croats and Muslims committed a few atrocities of their own as Yugoslavia broke apart. And a West defender may note that she was not equipped with a crystal ball showing Slobodan Milosevic's rise a half century later. When she wrote, the Serbs readily evoked Western sympathy: They were on the Allied side in World War I, and would be again, before the book went to press, in World War II, when they were invaded for bravely defying Hitler. They were Christians, inheritors of the legacy of Byzantium, who freed themselves from five centuries of Turkish Islamic domination, and had fought as well to free Macedonia and Bosnia. Their king had just been assassinated in France in an act machinated by Mussolini and abetted, through silence, by the world's nations. They suffered greatly throughout their history, including World War I, when the war with more powerful Austria swept back and forth over the land twice, forcing the army and many civilians to flee at one point in a horrifying death march through winter and mountains. And the Serbs had always fought with little more than moral support from great power allies, who betrayed them again and again. Weighing against them was their Orthodox Christian rite which often put them at odds with the powerful Roman Catholic Church. This book, however much it might have seemed dated during the 1990s, takes on a greater significance in the post 9/11 world: She shows us just how deep the roots of the Christian-Islamic conflict run in this land, for centuries that conflict's front line. West, for example, distinguishes marvelously between the Bosnian Muslims - Slavs who converted to Islam during the Turkish occupation, many of them Slav nationalists who supported Yugoslav nationhood - and the Turks themselves, who regarded the Slavs as other and inferior. She finds fascinating cross-religious alliances, with the Austrian Catholics cozying up to the Muslims of Bosnia when Austria ruled it, to the detriment of the land's Croat Catholics and Orthodox Serbs, who expected better of fellow Christians. She details a positively surreal scene in Sarajevo, where the Muslims anxiously await the first Turkish republican emissaries since the Ottomans were driven out a half century earlier. When these modern, Westernized diplomats arrive, from their land where Ataturk banned the fez and the burka, they are warm to modern Yugoslav officials, but baffled by and cool to what they regard as the still-backwards, Orientalized Muslims of Bosnia. West got away with a writing style full of ethnic generalizations that, today, would likely be attacked, by airheads anyway, as politically incorrect, regardless of the many hard truths she wrote. A feminist, she wrote of gender in a way delightfully free of today's academic cant. You'll find nary a "patriarchy" or "hegemony" here; she talks of men and women only when it matters. I don't believe she leans too strongly towards the Serbs. It is, after all, in great part the story of their lands, and of the short-lived state led by their monarchy. Her section on Bosnia, where the Croats, Serbs and Muslims all mixed, is fair to all sides. She finds much with which to fascinate the reader in Dubrovnik and elsewhere along the Dalmatian coast. The primary villains here are the Turks - not today's modernized, democratic Turks, but their imperial Ottoman predecessors, who sucked wealth and civilization out of the Balkans to set the stage for today's animosities. And West even manages to find some redemption for them in their transcending love of nature and the well-designed, pleasant homes they left behind. You are unlikely to find in English a more cogent account of the Archduke Ferdinand's assassination, which led to World War I. One sees how this equalled the Kennedy assassination for its lingering scent of conspiracy - was the killing actually orchestrated by the Russians? by the Austrians themselves? - and surpassed it in shaking the world, despite targeting a much less popular or powerful man. Many histories can supply hard facts. BLGF stands out for West's elegant travelogue writing in which she lashes together history; national and individual character; geography, ethnicity, and politics. She and her husband journey through Yugoslavia accompanied by a guide and translator who, also a poet, helps interpret the places that signify in Yugoslav history, as well as mundane settings from which West gleans the essence of the nation's many peoples. The book's length daunts, and sometimes the writing drags. Tensions with the guide-poet's German wife during the group's trip through Macedonia take up too much space. But one can forgive even this: West finds, in this woman's hostility and condescension toward her husband's country, the attitudes that were then driving Germany toward conquest - including its brutal occupation of Yugoslavia beginning in 1941, the year this book was published. Readers might consider countering the book's length by taking each national section - on Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia and so forth - as individual books, setting the tome down for a while before starting the next unit.
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Summary: Yugoslavia through Western eyes
Review: The scope of this book is so large that it's hard to know where to start. I started the book knowing very little about Yugoslavia and now feel that I have been given a thorough introduction--a meticulously guided tour in fact, of this underappreciated, highly complex and strangely beautiful country. Not only is this book a fine informal introduction to Yugoslavian culture and history, but it sucessfully shows how decidedly the various peoples of Yugoslavia have been shaped by the actions of its powerful neighbors. In the process, one gets detailed glimpses of imperial Rome, Byzantium, Turkey, and Austria-Hungary, not to mention something of the Orthodox, Catholic, and Islamic faiths. Another reviewer has remarked that the "stream of consciousness" writing is confusing, however, being above all a travelogue, I thought it entirely appropriate that the book should follow the route of the author's travels, focusing on where she is at the moment rather than the chronological approach of a conventional history book. What struck me from the beginning was West's gift for communicating even the most subtle and delicate impressions so precisely. Even if you do not agree with her opinions on certain things (and in a work of this scope written sixty years ago, it is probably a rare coincidence that a reader would agree with everything in it) you will have to admire the careful consideration and observation that went into the making of those opinions. It does not pretend to be an objective history, but is an account of prewar Yugoslavia seen through the sympathetic, perceptive, yet foreign eyes of a Western tourist. This is definitely a book that I will revisit again and again. Warning: This is not a good choice for someone who just wants a good page-turner. It's long & involved (took me 3 months to finish) and will induce you to do some very serious thinking. It made me realize how very under-educated I am in European history, college degree nonwithstanding.
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Summary: Bombers and Mash
Review: The subtitle of this book is "The Domestic Front, 1939-45", which suggests that it will be an essential read for anyone interested in the Battle of Britain in 1940-41. The focus is on the role of the British women in that period, and their roles as mothers, wives, factory workers, nurses, entertainers, farmers and others. In the process, the authors provide a wide-ranging description of life in the British isles during the period. Not the least of the virtues of the book are numerous photographs--dramatic ones of bomb shelter existence, domestic ones such as that of a woman pondering the complexities of ration stamps. Also fascinating are reproductions of posters, advertisements, government documents, and other semi-official literature to inform and inspire the civilian population. This book will be invaluable to anyone interested in the period.
Rating: 
Summary: A waste of bookcase shelf space...
Review: This book is huge and I have only read chapters. If you have a month, read it. I have more important things to do.
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Summary: Sexually Obsessed and Repressed in the Balkans
Review: This book will perk your interest in travelogues and Balkan embroidery. It is masterpiece theatre fodder as well as an a comprenhensive overview of Balkan history and politics. (1) She is decidedly biased (as acknowledged in other reviews); pro-Serbian and anti-Teutonic. Examples of her anti-Teutonic bias include: Germans sneaking into the first class compartment on a train, the vilification of a German orthodox monk, the pomposity of the German WWI memorial, and the cruel Austrians who imprisoned Princip in a damp and unhealthy cell as punishment for assassinating the Archduke.
(2) Rebecca West was obsessed with degrading effeminate men and discussing the castration of masculinity. This obsession led us to believe all was not well between Rebecca and her banker husand in the bedroom. We were left questioning the sexuality of her emasculated husband.
(3) Often times Rebecca was left alone, when her husband and their driver, Dragutin, suspiciously disappeared and then returned after long periods of time with pretty flowers for Rebecca.
(4) We think this is an engrossing introduction to the Balkans, author's subjectivity notwithstanding. Rebecca's characters in the book may not be real; they may have been embellished to make a point. For example, did Constantine - the self-hating Jew - and Gerda - his pro-Nazi wife - really exist, or were they invented for propoganda purposes? We think Rebecca was trying to alert the unsuspecting populace of Europe to the negativism of fascism.
(5) Did she buy heavily embroidered clothes for her effeminate banker husband? Where are all of those fine examples of Balkan folk art now? However, having just recently returned from the Balkans, one of us can attest that works of embroidery are still sold as souvenirs, albeit in the airport gift shop.
(6) Her absence of gruesome details of torture are most appreciated. Even without gory details, there is a memorable account of Queen Draga's assisnation and how the palace coupe was brought to fruition at her very "finger tips". Wait a minute, Queen Draga, or was it a Drag Queen?
(7) Amuse yourself by opening the book at random and seeing how many descriptions you can count of "jolly, healthy men".
(8) What did Rebecca have in mind when she recounted the episode in Montenegro where she was led down a slippery and rocky precipice in the mountains by a disturbed young man? In addition to the salient points above: the prose was exemplary, however, the length was daunting - it took one busy executive six months to finish the book, while another executive finished it in two months, as he was able to read it during staff meetings.
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Summary: Not just a book, it's a genre of its own
Review: This is a fascinating book on a number of levels. It is intensely personal, written in Rebecca West's characteristic tone of bullying good sense. It describes with great insight personal relations between a number of sharply-drawn "characters" in a distinctly novelistic way. It also provides a vivid travelogue of a long-lost age, by now nearly as remote as the middle ages, irretrievably lost to us behind the triple cataclysms of World War II, communism and Milosevic. Finally, long digressions in the book provide an impressionistic presentation of Yugoslavian (mainly Serbian) history. The weakest part of the book, in my opinion, is the dialogue, which is frequently stilted and for that reason detracts from the immediacy of the travelogue. West's unnamed husband -- referred throughout merely as "my husband" -- is made to talk exactly as West herself writes, and unsurprisingly he and she always agree. But that the book should contain considerable dialogue, and that of distinctly intellectual cast, in itself illustrates its uniqueness. Reviewer Edo Bosnar's main complaint, it seems, is that the book is not something that it makes no claim to be. It's not a textbook of Balkan history or politics, nor is it presented as a work of scholarly research or interpretation. It makes no pretense of being fair -- fairness doesn't enter into it. What makes the book so compelling, in my view, is precisely that it doesn't fit into any category. It's not just a book, it's a genre all its own. I write as a person who believes that no book should exceed 300 pages without some very good reasons. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon has some excellent reasons for its great length.
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Summary: Scottish Journey
Review: This is not a book for present-day tourists, even putting aside the date. The poet Muir took an automobile trip on his own through Scotland in 1934. A large theme of the book is the contrast between the rural, idyllic Orkney, where he was born and grew up, and present-day Scotland, urbanized, poverty-stricken, and everywhere ugly. Much of the book is spent on longish chapters of description of Glasgow and its people, since the Victorian period a horrific subject. Some may be offended by the constant leftist-Socialist take on current economic and social conditions. More questionable is a kind of drifting treatment of the trip that lacks both a strong narrative thrust and a constant presentation of rich personal experience. As a nostalgic backward look at pre-war Scotland, this is to be recommended.
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