Books about Balkans from Amazon.com

Hailed by feminists as one of the most important contributions to women's studies in the last decade, this gripping, beautifully written account describes the daily struggles of women under the Marxist regime in the former republic of Yugoslavia..
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From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare now sweeping Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the twentieth century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy.

This enthralling and often chilling political travelogue fully deciphers the Balkans' ancient passions and intractable hatreds for outsiders. For as Kaplan travels among the vibrantly-adorned churches and soul-destroying slums of the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, he allows us to see the region's history as a time warp in which Slobodan Milosevic becomes the reincarnation of a fourteenth-century Serbian martyr; Nicolae Ceaucescu is called "Drac," or "the Devil"; and the one-time Soviet Union turns out to be a continuation of the Ottoman Empire..
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The history of the Balkan states, like that of so much of the world, has for centuries been marked by ethnocidal fracases, savage wars of conquest, and periods of eerie calm. The mountainous region's shifting alliances and divisions have long puzzled outside observers, writes journalist Misha Glenny, the author of The Fall of Yugoslavia: "For many decades, Westerners gazed on these lands as if [they were] an ill-charted zone separating Europe's well-ordered civilization from the chaos of the Orient."

Those outsiders, Glenny suggests, have been the source of much of the Balkans' misery. In only the last two centuries, the territory has been contested by the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, the Third Reich, and the Allies, all of whom exploited and exacerbated existing ethnic conflict. (The Nazi occupiers of Croatia, he writes, even had to rein in the fascist Ustase militia for fear that their campaign against Serbs and Muslims would only strengthen resistance to their puppet government.) And, he continues, attempts to quell the recent conflict in Bosnia have created problems of their own. He argues that war will break out anew the moment international troops are withdrawn and that the Dayton Agreement is too "full of anomalies and frictions" to stand. The intervention in Kosovo has been no better, he adds, and the Allies' misguided efforts are sure to yield only further bloodshed if the only objective is to remove Slobodan Milosevic from power. "Should the West fail to address the effects, not merely of a three-month air war in 1999, but of 120 years of miscalculation and indifference since the Congress of Berlin, then there will be little to distinguish NATO's actions from any of its great-power predecessors," Glenny concludes.

Glenny's provocative book sheds much light on recent Balkan history--and on the region's likely future. --Gregory McNamee.
Price: $9.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A chance encounter with a Turkish colonel with a penchant for British crime novels leads mystery writer Charles Latimer into a world of sinister political and criminal maneuvers throughout the Balkans in the years between the world wars. Hoping that the career of the notorious Dimitrios, whose body has been identified in an Istanbul morgue, will inspire a plot for his next novel, Latimer soon finds himself caught up in a shadowy web of assassination, espionage, drugs, and treachery..
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A landmark work of New Journalism is now available in softcover

Safe Area Gorazde is Joe Sacco's 240-page opus about the war in the former Yugoslavia Sacco spent four months in Bosnia in 1995-1996, immersing himself in the human side of life during wartime, researching stories rarely found in conventional news coverage. The book focuses on the Muslim enclave of Gorazde, which was besieged by Bosnian Serbs during the war. Sacco spent four weeks in Gorazde, entering before the Muslims trapped inside had access to the outside world, electricity or running water.

The hardcover edition of Safe Area Gorazde put Sacco on the map as one of the pre-eminent journalists of his time, and the softcover edition will present his work to a wider audience. The book has been prominently featured in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Time, Utne Reader, Spin, The London Times, The Washington Post, Brill's Content, several NPR programs, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly, and other media. The book also led to Sacco being named a recipient of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship. Safe Area Gorazde features an introduction by Christopher Hitchens, political columnist for The Nation and Vanity Fair..
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"Little did the coauthors realize at the time they embarked upon this project over a glass of plum brandy in Bucharest more than twenty-five years ago, that their work would result in the discovery of the authentic, bloodthirsty prototype for Bram Stoker's famous novel Dracula." This pioneering study, first published in 1972, became a collector's item, so this fully updated edition is welcome indeed. The authors' pursuit of the notion that Vlad the Impaler (1431-76) was the original Dracula--through treks both antiquarian (in old libraries and museums) and geographic (in areas of Romania that were once Transylvania and Walachia)--has the thrill of an adventure story. In Search of Dracula is also an entertaining introduction to vampire lore and to people's obsession with Dracula. It has a delightful cover by Edward Gorey and numerous illustrations, including antique woodcuts of Vlad's impaled victims and photos from the authors' trips to Romania..
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Published in Britain to great acclaim -- a startling, gut-wrenching memoir of war, personal dissolution, and rebirth -- based on the author's experiences in Bosnia.

When tragedy strikes Bill Carter's life he finds himself drawn to an unlikely place -- Bosnia, in the midst of its civil war. Searching for meaning in the heart of darkness, he manages to find lodging in an abandoned tower block and sets out getting supplies to the starved, besieged citizens of Sarajevo. It is there that Carter emerges from his stupor. Inspired by a community of people working to bring relief to the city, he daringly enlists the help of music group U2 and its lead singer, Bono, who set up satellite links on the band's Zooropa tour that allowed ordinary citizens of Sarajevo to speak unedited and live on 90-foot television screens to thousands of concertgoers worldwide.

Just as Michael Herr's Vietnam memoir Dispatches captured the horror of war for the '60s generation, Bill Carter's Fools Rush In will be the seminal book for this generation on the visceral and transformative impact of war in our time..
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• Explore the world of open source Flash and discover which tools are available.
• Learn how to identify which tool you need and how to best fit it into your workflow.
• Step-by-step walk-throughs guide you through development with the most popular open source Flash tools.
• Written by the project leads and open source Flash aficionados.

The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development is a practical development guide to creating Flash applications with open source Flash tools and workflows. You will walk away with an understanding of what tools will best suit your current situation, making your development easier and more productive, and with the knowledge of how to install and set up some of the best tools available, including the following:

• Papervision3D: to create 3D in Flash
• Red5: to stream video over the internet
• SWX: to build data-driven mashups and mobile apps
• Fuse: to make ActionScript animation a cinch
• Go: to build your own animation tools in ActionScript 3.0
• haXe: to create Flash files and more
• AMFPHP: to communicate between Flash and php

Open source Flash has been a revolution for Flash and has made a major impact on how people build Flash content. The open source tools available expand on Flash's existing tool set, enabling you to perform such tasks as easily create full 3D in Flash or hook up to an open source video-streaming server. Many of these useful tools are powerful yet lack documentation. this book explains in step-by-step detail how to use the most popular open source Flash tools.

If you want to expand your Flash tool set and explore the open source Flash community, then this book is for you. If you already use some open source Flash tools, then you will find this book a useful documentation resource as well as an eye-opener to the other tools that are available.

Summary of Contents

• Chapter 1 Introducing the World of Open Source Flash
• Chapter 2 Exploring Open Source Flash: What's Available
• Chapter 3 Preparing an Open Source Workflow
• Chapter 4 Using an Open Source Workflow
• Chapter 5 Testing and Debugging
• Chapter 6 Deploying Your Application
• Chapter 7 Using AMFPHP
• Chapter 8 Working with SWX: The Native Data Format for the Flash Platform
• Chapter 9 Using haXe
• Chapter 10 Fuse and GoASAP: Open Source Animation Tools
• Chapter 11 Using Papervision3D
• Chapter 12 Introducing Red5
• Chapter 13 Building Some Red5 Apps

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Price: $26.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In 1991, an ethnically diverse region that had enjoyed decades of peaceful coexistence descended into bitter hatred and chaos, almost overnight. Communities fractured along lines of ethnic and religious affiliation and the ensuing fighting was deeply personal, resulting in brutality, rape and torture, and ultimately the deaths of thousands of people. This book examines the internal upheavals of the former Yugoslavia and their international implications, including the failure of the Vance-Owen plan; the first use of NATO in a combat role and in peace enforcement; and the war in Kosovo, unsanctioned by the UN but prosecuted by NATO forces to prevent the ethnic cleansing of the region..
Price: $10.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]