Balkanalysis.com

Balkanalysis.com’s Summer Reading Selections

What Balkan-related (and unrelated) books did Balkanalysis.com readers select this summer from Amazon.com? Here is a list of the most popular items by category selected during the past 3 months. The list includes several old favorites, as well as some new and unusual items. Happy reading!

Balkan Contemporary

For ‘instant history’ and similar contemporary accounts, readers looked to a variety of books, unsurprisingly mostly those taking a critical look at the policy of Western intervention in the region. Scott Taylor’s first-hand account of the Kosovo War, and a perennial favorite, Inat: Images of Serbia and the Kosovo Conflict was selected, as were other Kosovo-related books such as Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War
by Julie Mertus and Diane Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions. More generally related to the disaster of the 1990’s wars in Yugoslavia was Yugoslava: Death of a Nation by Laura Silber and Allan Little.

More speculative works devoted to the region selected included Ivo Andric’s classic, The Bridge on the Drina, as well as an interesting work blending theory and experience, Imagining the Balkans by Maria Todorova. To add flavor to things, we had a cookbook- Bulgarian Rhapsody : The Best of Balkan Cuisine.

Balkan History

Also Bulgaria-related was R.J. Crampton’s contribution to the excellent Cambridge Concise History series, the succinct A Concise History of Bulgaria.

Several works that have been previously reviewed on Balkanalysis.com were purchased, such as two on the always interesting Balkan Wars, one from the Turkish point of view (Defeat in Detail: The Ottoman Army in the Balkans, 1912-1913, by Edward J. Erickson) and another more general account (Balkan Wars, 1912-1913 : Prelude to the First World War by Richard C. Hall). More military history, this time concerning WWWII, was Dietrich Orlow’s The Nazis in the Balkans: A case study of totalitarian politics.  

One of the most interesting new books of the year, Cumans and Tatars : Oriental Military in the Pre-Ottoman Balkans, 1185-1365 by Istvan Vasary and Cambridge University Press, was also selected, as was that modern classic by Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War & the Great Powers, 1804-1999.

Related but not exactly Balkan were two works on the understudied medieval Norman kingdom, The Norman Conquest of Southern Italy and Sicily by Gordon S. Brown, and The Norman Kingdom of Sicily (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks) by Donald Matthew.

Others

Some of the non-Balkan books picked out included another cookbook, Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, as well as innovative guide to the Russian language, TROIKA : A Communicative Approach to Russian Language, Life, and Culture.

Meanwhile, another reader picked up the compelling new guide to supra-competitive capitalism, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant.

On the tech side of things, one reader’s vacation photos were enhanced with the purchase of the Canon PowerShot S410 4MP Digital Elph with 3x Optical Zoom.

The Book of the Summer

The book purchased this summer that we’re recommending most, however, is the eye-opening government insider account, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. The lengthy Amazon.com blurb explains very well why this book is so important:

“…John Perkins started and stopped writing Confessions of an Economic Hit Man four times over 20 years. He says he was threatened and bribed in an effort to kill the project, but after 9/11 he finally decided to go through with this expose of his former professional life. Perkins, a former chief economist at Boston strategic-consulting firm Chas. T. Main, says he was an ‘economic hit man’ for 10 years, helping U.S. intelligence agencies and multinationals cajole and blackmail foreign leaders into serving U.S. foreign policy and awarding lucrative contracts to American business. ‘Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars,’ Perkins writes. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is an extraordinary and gripping tale of intrigue and dark machinations. Think John Le Carré, except it’s a true story.

Perkins writes that his economic projections cooked the books Enron-style to convince foreign governments to accept billions of dollars of loans from the World Bank and other institutions to build dams, airports, electric grids, and other infrastructure he knew they couldn’t afford. The loans were given on condition that construction and engineering contracts went to U.S. companies. Often, the money would simply be transferred from one bank account in Washington, D.C., to another one in New York or San Francisco. The deals were smoothed over with bribes for foreign officials, but it was the taxpayers in the foreign countries who had to pay back the loans. When their governments couldn’t do so, as was often the case, the U.S. or its henchmen at the World Bank or International Monetary Fund would step in and essentially place the country in trusteeship, dictating everything from its spending budget to security agreements and even its United Nations votes.”

………………………..

Over the next few months, we will continue to review many more new Balkan-related books. As always, readers should feel free to recommend to us books that they would like to see reviewed. Please send any suggestions to contact@balkanalysis.com.