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| Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Penguin Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Rebecca West
Creator: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $14.32
You Save: $10.68 (43%)
Buy New/Used/Collectible from $7.88
Avg. Customer Rating:  (50 reviews)
Sales Rank: 115506
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 1232
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 2.3
ISBN: 014310490X
Dewey Decimal Number: 914.970421
EAN: 9780143104902
ASIN: 014310490X
Publication Date: January 30, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West?s classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans and the uneasy relationships among its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country?s history as well as its daily life.
Amazon.com Review
Part travelogue, part history, part love letter on a thousand-page scale, Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a genre-bending masterwork written in elegant prose. But what makes it so unlikely to be confused with any other book of history, politics, or culture--with, in fact, any other book--is its unashamed depth of feeling: think The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire crossed with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. West visited Yugoslavia for the first time in 1936. What she saw there affected her so much that she had to return--partly, she writes, because it most resembled "the country I have always seen between sleeping and waking," and partly because "it was like picking up a strand of wool that would lead me out of a labyrinth in which, to my surprise, I had found myself immured." Black Lamb is the chronicle of her travels, but above all it is West following that strand of wool: through countless historical digressions; through winding narratives of battles, slavery, and assassinations; through Shakespeare and Augustine and into the very heart of human frailty. West wrote on the brink of World War II, when she was "already convinced of the inevitability of the second Anglo-German war." The resulting book is colored by that impending conflict, and by West's search for universals amid the complex particulars of Balkan history. In the end, she saw the region's doom--and our own--in a double infatuation with sacrifice, the "black lamb and grey falcon" of her title. It's the story of Abraham and Isaac without the last-minute reprieve: those who hate are all too ready to martyr the innocent in order to procure their own advantage, and the innocent themselves are all too eager to be martyred. To West, in 1941, "the whole world is a vast Kossovo, an abominable blood-logged plain." Unfortunately, little has happened since then to prove her wrong. --Mary Park
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| Customer Reviews: Read 45 more reviews...
A Croat's Return to Yugoslavia August 26, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book recounts a journey made by the author and her husband as they traveled through Croatia, Dalmatia, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Old Serbia, and Montenegro at a time when Hitter threatened to engulf all of Europe in a World War.
Describing and analyzing the journey, the author fills more than a thousand pages.
The highlight of the book is the epilogue which recounts the author's thoughts of the impact her travels made on assessing the politics of Germany and the Balkans at a turning point in history.
 For All That March 6, 2007
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Yes "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" is wonderful for all the reasons stated in these reviews, but for all that it must be said that the dominant theme of Ms West's masterpiece is the eternal human condition. She sees with the eyes of a woman and the eyes of a genius. She has seen humanity's troubled soul, and gently brought it to the surface in the fabric of her marvelous linguistic tapestry. "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" is in a class by its self.
a fascinating mess December 19, 2006
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
BLGF is a gigantic grab bag of a book.If your interested in the former yugoslavia,it is a fascinating read.Although i don't think anyone would wish it longer than it is.West offers sharp and at times profound insights.However the reader needs to be careful.West's prejudices distort much of what is on view.The first of these is her near pathological hostility to all things german.One might think that would not be all that important in a book on yugoslavia.It turns out to be of critical importance.West combines this anti-germanic perspective with a pronounced anti-catholic bias.Once you realize this the opinions expressed in the book as well as its omissions begin to make a kind of sense.It's telling that West virtually ignores slovenia except to point to bad conduct by the catholic church.Slovenia is mostly catholic and even worse the most"austrian " of yugoslavia's nations. As such i think she considers it unworthy of her attention.Croatia is a place she has to write about but one can infer she'd rather not.The croats are too catholic and somewhat german influenced.Almost as bad they are also italian and hungarian influenced.They just aren't "slavic" enough! Well it is fairly easy to guess who is slavic enough,the serbs.This is a very distorted picture.Westdoes seem to think that the serbs are noble savages by virtue of their freedom from non slavic influences.Whereas the northern south slavs are tainted by foreigness.To say the least,this is a strange viewpoint for a writer of"advanced" views.It smacks of an odd provincialism.Italy was at one point one of the most creative and dynamic societies on earth.It's croatias neighbor.Does West really think that the croatians should have turned their back on italy inorder to cultivate slavic purity?I think the answer is ,yes.West dissmisses late imperial austria as an intellectual and cultural wasteland.That can only be explained as a by product of ignorance.This was afterall the land of klimt,mahler,freud and wittgenstein.Joseph Roth would wind up downright nostalgic about it.West says austria-hungary was the most repressive state in europe after russia.This is oddin two ways.One i doubt it's true.Austria was more repressive than the ottoman empire,spain,portugal,romania and bulgaria?Also even if true no one with a straight face could argue that austria was comprable to russia as a tyranny.That said this peculiar book is fascinating.Although like some of the other reviewers i too wondered what's the story on the husband and what's allthis talk about the positive benefits of the absence of homosexuality?(and where did she get that idea from?).
 Another misconception of Balkan realities December 18, 2006
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
A nice read but highly romanticized outlook of the old Yugoslav Kingdom and the people of Yugoslavia. The book is based on the author's interaction with the Yugoslav intellectual elite and her observation of the people of old Yugoslavia Her interpretation of the Slav character needs to be understood in the context of the orientalist approach of the time- as a result - the Slav character in the book is idealized in the same manner that modern day nationalist in the same region see themselves. Namely, the great Slavic nation of the Serbs who defended Europe from the Turks and saved the rest of the Southern Slavs from the Austrians. Given the time in which it was written (late 30s) the author suffers from an extreme germanophobia in every possible sense! She seems to come across only irrational, pompous and arrogant Germans who can't appreciate the Yugoslav people in the same way that she and her husband can. The book is extremely pro-Serbian, so much so that the Croatian and Macedonian discontent and wish for separation is seen not as a solution to the Serbian dominated Kingdom but as, sometimes Vatican sometimes Austrian and sometimes Italian inspired propaganda to divide the otherwise brotherly relations between the Serbs and the Croats! How much of this brotherly love was genuine - we saw in the WWII that followed the authors book as well as the bloody brake up of Socialist Yugoslavia. As much as she has made a conscious attempt not to become another British traveler in the Balkans that picks her pet-nation and promotes their interests - she falls under the Balkan trap of victimization and myths and becomes in the process an ardent pro-Serb - as indeed her political activities would later reveal.
Unique mosaic of time and places now gone November 4, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The prose in this book weaves a mosaic of rural and town life in the 1930s Yugoslavia which is gone in fact but captured in West's captivating prose. This was a Yugoslavia whose name was adopted a few years before, whose eastern and southern borders were agreed in 1913 with Bulgaria and Greece , just one year after the Ottomans had been evicted in 1912 after 500 years of rule . And published just before Catholic Croatia's Tito and Orthodox Serbia's Mihailovich led separate resistances against the Germans then like two pit bull terriers fought until Tito emerged as victor and ruler for three decades . The war between these carnivores ended in 1991 with the unravelling of the mosaic West had so beautifully weaved just over 50 years before.
The scenes-in-words of a run-down town of Bitola (ex-Monastir) and a lakeside lovely Ochrid provide instructive insights into a Macedonia before the Communist Tito created a Republic of Macedonia (in 1944) in an effort to destabilise the northern borders of Greece at the beginning of her wrenching civil war.
West's is a must-read for students and scholars of the land of the southern Slavs during the fleeting time it was a union and they wish to relish one of the classics of 20th century English prose.
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