Curtain Calls: Travels in Albania, Romania and Bulgaria

Rating:
Summary: Chatty travelogue from another era
Review: As one with a lifelong interest in the Balkans, and one who actually got to travel there too, I am always on the lookout for good books on the area. So, I was happy to find CURTAIN CALLS in a bookstore in Nova Scotia. But, I'm afraid it is a little too light and chatty for me. I can't say that it is not well-written, no, the author has a pleasant style, but it's rather insubstantial, breezy, and more than a little gossipy, with far too much information about his various guides and mentors in the then rigidly controlled Balkan societies. If you like that sort of apolitical travelogue, pretty much blow by blow, then this book could be for you. Secondly, the whole area has changed so much in the last 20-odd years since Gardiner wrote, that the kind of information a would-be traveller could glean from this book would be well-nigh useless. I feel that a person who wants to know what the Balkans are like today---as well as one who wants to know what they were like in the 1970s---could do better elsewhere.