Bosnia: A Short History

Rating:
Summary: Arguably best popular history of Bosnia and Hercegovina
Review: Although by no means without bias, this is arguably the best popular history of Bosnia and Hercegovina on the market. It covers developments from the earliest times up to 1993. Malcom blames especially forces outside of Bosnia and Hercegovina for that country's destruction-in particular Serbia's leadership and the "fatal interference of the leaders of the West."

Rating:
Summary: Good historical account
Review: Althought the author is not Bosnian the book tends to lean a little in favor of Muslims. I have yet to find a book that is completely unbiased on the matter though (every book seems to be pro Croats, Muslims or Serbs). However, it is a fairly clear account of how Bosnia came to be.

Rating:
Summary: A Good History Of Bosnia
Review: Basically, the name says it all. It's a short, quick history of Bosnia written at the height of the 1990s Balkan War and designed to shoot down a number of myths that the author finds maddening. He ends up having quite a blast ripping into long-dead historians, propagandists, and contemporary journalists and politicians for messing up Bosnian history.

While you could say it's biased, the author does do a pretty decent job in covering the history of Bosnia. After taking a brief look at Early Bosnia up to 1100 the book mostly focuses on Medieval and Ottoman Bosnia before breezing through the 20th-century. If you were looking for a history of the Bosnian War don't bother, as the book was written before it was over. However, the author does cover its origins and beginning. He also very strongly makes the point that it was systematic planned genocide by Slobodan Milosevic, not so-called ancient tribal hatreds, that was responsible for much of the carnage in the conflict.

All in all it was a very good book. There's a little something for everyone. It's very well written. You can breeze through the small chapters, finish the book in a day, and get a basic outline of everything. Or you can go slow, immerse yourself in the little details, and become a genuine mini-expert on Bosnian history. If you hate foreign words, then there might be a problem because the author uses them constantly and often describes the origins of words to show history. But despite that it's still easy to read. In the end, I came way with a better understanding of topics not generally covered in the history books: Bosnia, the Balkans, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and Islam among other things.

Rating:
Summary: An important insight into the history of Bosnia
Review: Being a Bosnian, I find this book highly valuable and unusually accurate. As my fellow Bosnian Adnan Mesic pointed out in his review, this is a very accurate and comprehensive account of Bosnian history. I agree with Adnan that it is a shame that the most lucid and most importantly unbiased book was written by an American. Malcolm divulges in his book major historical events which may have contributed to the war in Bosnia. It is clear that Malcolm had conducted a meticulous research before he completed this book; this is highly evident from the great number of references which are included. All in all, this is an indispensable reference that will provide an important insight into the history of Bosnia. Strongly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: It is almost sad that the most accurate historic book about Bosnia was writen, not by a person born in Bosnia, but someone born outside it's borders. In Bosnia today there are three official versions of history, Bosnian, Croatian and Serb, (...), none of which give Bosnian history respect and accuracy it deserves. They are mostly expansions of the myths and deluded ilusions of people who never thought of Bosnia as their home, their homeland. Unfortunately, as it has happened so many times before, the few were able to tint the picture of Bosnia, not only to the world outside, but also tint the picture of Bosnia to people in Bosnia themselves. It is absurd, but true. Malcolm takes a bold step to clear that picture to both insiders and outsiders and bright the historical perspective closer to the truth.
The author takes a fresh and unbiased look at the centuries of Bosnian history, and most of all he backs it up with an enormous detail and footnote. He is not just speculating, he is listing facts....isn't that something fresh for history of a country, where loudest (and equally sadly most successful) proponents base their entire knowledge on vague narrative and myth.
The most interesting part of the book for me was his unrestrained bashing of the UN, EU, US and the world in general for lack of action; of countless narrowminded envoys these countries assigned to "rescue" Bosnia. This part of the book has a great place in any history book for it shows ineptness and impotence of the world community to solve a problem when there are no vital geopolitical interests in danger-offcourse I am talking about the major players.
All in all, great unbiased book, should find its way as an official version of Bosnian history, rather that the garbage the kids are being thought in Bosnia today. I recommend it to anyone even mildly interested in understanding the conflict that was imposed to my country.

Rating:
Summary: Very accurate but with small inaccuracies and nuances
Review: Malcolm does a pretty good job in covering almost 1000 years of Slav history in Bosnia. Most of his book looks at Bosnia during the Ottoman Empire and the reign of the Kotromanic dynasty. His narrative for the most part is very clear-sighted and does not allow anger or bitterness to take over, unlike many other historians who have written books on the Balkans (Philip Cohen springs to mind)

Saying that, however, there are certain subjects that he just doesn't cover in enough detail, particularly since they were very important parts of Bosnia's history. For example, he mentions the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia during WW2 in passing, reserving only one sentence on this subject, and completely fails to mention that thousands upon thousands of Serbs, Jews and others perished there.

His last chapter about the most recent Bosnian war I found to be too short and simplistic. He blames forces in Serbia for most of the mayhem wrought upon Bosnia, which is fair enough, but does not even hint at the fact that Bosniacs and Croats also committed war crimes. While the Serbs were busy expelling and killing Bosniacs from their area of control, the Croats were also doing the same in Herzegovina and central Bosnia, culminating into a civil war between the Bosniacs and the Croats during 1992-1994. This side of Bosnia's tragedy is sadly neglected.

Ok, as the title describes, it is a SHORT history at the end of the day but it just seems to me as if he managed to cover the earlier parts of Bosnia's history very well but seems to slightly taper of at the end of the book. All in all, a good book which is certainly one of the more balanced books out there on Bosnia.







Rating:
Summary: An excellent piece of work.
Review: Malcolm manages to cover the entire gamut in this brief but rich work. From pre-Ottoman Bosnia, through the Ottomans and Austrians up until the present. He not only offers excellent facts, but in the spirit of the true historian, analyzes and juxtaposes the various versions of historical literature on the region that has been accumulated over the years. If you want a great introduction to Bosnian history, then this is the way to go.

Rating:
Summary: By far the best English language history of Bosnia
Review: Malcolm's BOSNIA: A SHORT HISTORY is an outstanding work. The book shows the range of Bosnian history and the rich complexity and texture of its various religions. It puts into perspective the savage attack on Bosnia, both by nationalist militias and by propagandist media within the former Yugoslavia.

Particularly impressive is the discussion of the Bosnian Church, which brings into a clear and accessible language the breakthroughs by Balkan and Western historians on early Bosnian Church history. Malcolm demolishes the mythologized history of the Serbian and Croatian militias by showing that the patterns of conversion in Bosnia were historically complex. He refutes the notion that present day Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims are derived in a straight pattern of blood descent from the 15th century. Indeed, there were large-scale conversions back and forth throughout the history of Bosnia.

This is no abstract scholarly debate. The stereotype that present-day Bosnian Muslims are descendants of "traitors" in the 15th century who betrayed Christianity is a key element in the attack on Bosnia and also a part of the mythology of "age old hatreds" promulgated by the architects of ethnic-cleansing and adopted by some Western policy makers and journalists.

Malcolm shows that Bosnia was for 500 years, despite its many tensions and wars, a successful civilization with different religions that engaged each other in complex ways far beyond the cliches of age-old hatreds.

This book is recommended for anyone who cares about the Balkans or who wishes to understand the stakes involved in the struggle against "ethnic cleansing."

Malcolm's analysis of the radical Serbian nationalism in Belgrade was unfortunately dismissed by some British political leaders and intellectuals. The horrors in Kosovo today are a tragic vindication of his analysis. Those who dismissed him with a facile refusal to acknowledge an unwelcome message, are left brutal evidence of what they denied.

Malcolm no doubt, and all of us, wish he had been wrong--or at least that his warnings, stated with such cogency and scholarly accuracy, had been heeded. There is still time to read this book now and allow the history of Bosnia to come through the smoke of genocide, ethnic-cleansing, and desires for religous apartheid based on historically false and destructive mythologies of age-old hatreds.

Rating:
Summary: Thorough yet condensed history of Bosnia
Review: Noel Malcolm's narrative is a short (271 pages, excluding footnotes and bibliography) yet concise history of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a region in Southeastern Europe that has, in recent years, been subject to highly destructive warfare. The book spans the very earliest of times, when the Slavs moved into the Balkan region, to the 1995 Dayton Accords that halted the bloodshed in Bosnia. In monitoring the crisis that engulfed the republic during the years 1992-1995, foreign observers were alarmingly uneducated as to the origins of the crisis, and of the history of this region. It was easy for such individuals to label the war as yet another "ethnic conflict" emerging as a result of "seething ethnic hatreds" that had been brewing among such groups to be found within the borders of Bosnia (or more specifically, that of the former Yugoslavia) for centuries. The truth, Malcolm has shown was far less elaborate; every conflict that has imbued the region had its origins from parties outside Bosnia's borders. The rich, multicultural population lived, until only a few years ago, in virtually perfect harmony. Bosnia: A Short History was originally written in 1994, in the midst of the devastating war that tore Yugoslavia apart and razed Bosnia to the ground. In light of this, Malcolm's noble intentions in writing the history of this tumultuous region were outlined in his Introduction to the book: "One sure way of judging the historical claims of the main perpetrators of violence in Bosnia is to look at what they have done to the physical evidence of history itself. They are not only ruining the future of that country; they are also making systematic efforts to eliminate its past...The people who have planned and ordered these actions like to say that history is on their side. What they show by their deeds is that they are waging a war against the history of their country. All I have wanted to do in this book is to set out some of the details of that history before the country itself is utterly destroyed."

Noel Malcolm's qualifications for writing this history are immense. Though the reviewer believes that in-depth research and a passion for knowledge are the few qualifications that one requires in order to write a history; Malcolm's credentials deserve mention. With a doctorate in history, he studied in Great Britain, at Eton and Cambridge. For a number of years, he taught at Cambridge, then later became a foreign correspondent for a number of periodicals (The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph). Following a careful examination of the dense footnotes and bibliography to be found in the back pages of Bosnia, one also discovers that he is a linguist. He has cited a vast amount of books, written in several languages. Besides knowing and citing works written in Serbo-Croatian (the language spoken throughout the former Yugoslavia, including Bosnia), he cited works in Russian, Romanian, French, German, Italian, Greek, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Spanish, Albanian, and even Latin. The dense footnotes to be found tucked inside the book (alone being 43 pages of citations) give evidence as to the wide variety of sources that he consults and cites in the body of his text. He used the evidence wisely, and was careful in corroborating several pieces before granting them factual status.

The book flows well, though Malcolm does occasionally fall into literary bouts of going into extreme detail surrounding origins. For instance, when he describes the origins of Bosnia's inhabitants, no possibilities are overlooked, and drudging through the seemingly endless details of possibilities of who came first makes rather tedious reading. Malcolm often employs the use of flashbacks, and for the impatient or carefree reader that forgets some events described, the flashback can serve as an instrument of confusion. It is written in sixteen chapters, plus an Introduction and in this current revised edition, an Epilogue that updates the history of Bosnia to include the crucial years 1993-1995. Each chapter encompasses a wide scope of history: the earlier chapters sometimes cover two hundred years or more, while the later chapters cover just a few. The book is therefore easy to follow, and its premise of being a "short history" makes it a book suitable for everyone, ranging from the disciplined academic, to the general reader.

Malcolm presents an unbiased account, presenting the claims of all sides and refuting many of the hoaxes and myths deliberately planted into the consciences of all Yugoslavs by its rulers. While remaining unbiased throughout, the factual blame is often in the hands of the most dominant ethnic group in Yugoslavia, the Serbs, who were the aggressors in the last decade of Yugoslavia's life. Particularly fascinating are chapters twelve and thirteen (pp. 156-192), which describe the origins and experiences of both world wars in Bosnia and the rise of the Ustasha and its profound effect on relations, particularly between Croats and Serbs, the latter of which were slaughtered by the thousands at the hands of the former. Chapter fourteen presents a case of Bosnia in Tito's Yugoslavia, an era that downgraded Bosnia's status and simmered tensions. Reading these chapters show that hostilities were not "ancient," though they were far from friendly at the opening of the Twentieth Century. By Chapters fifteen and sixteen, Yugoslavia is destroyed, and Sarajevo is an incinerator teeming with bullets.

Bosnia is a work to be enjoyed. Far from academic drawl and a benchmark of tediousness, it is a work of dedication and scholarship, filled with interesting and relatively unknown facts about a country long thought dead by the Western world. Besides this form of enlightenment, the book offers yet another perspective on the human tendency and capability for utter destructiveness. The published form is evidence of Noel Malcolm's sincerity and purpose in writing Bosnia. He had triumphed in laying out some of the details of Bosnia's complex history, thereby enriching the reader with a whole new perspective on the origins and character of the wars that engulfed the former Yugoslavia - particularly Bosnia. Before the country was "utterly destroyed" and the clock ticked closer to midnight, Malcolm succeeded in telling its story. That alone is commendable.