Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

View other editions of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
View books by Rebecca West.

What a fantastic book! - Rated
A middle-class englishwoman and her banker husband travel round Yugoslavia in the 1930s. Sounds dull, but it's actually one of the most engrossing books I have read for a long time - all 1200 pages of it. The digressions on the history of the Republic of Dubrovnik, Diocletian's palace in Split, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand etc are absolutely magical.

West has some odd ideas about religion and monarchy. She seems to be an Islamophobe and a Turkophobe, and I don't entirely like what she writes about Jews. She is an unashamed Serbophile in a way that is most unfashionable these days, and she has scant sympathy for anyone else's nationalism, but her heart and brain are undoubtedly in the right place.

Worth a read by anyone interested in the history of the Balkans, though not to be read uncritically.

The Mind of the Balkan - Rated
Never before and never after have the mind of this tortured region - the Balkan - been thus penetrated: with such passionate, humane precision, with such eloquence, with such empathy and such conviction. A classic, if ever there was any, a masterpiece without a doubt. It is as fresh as yesterday's news and as ancient as the monasteries it describes. It is an eternal work, a must for Balkan afficionados, a work of scholarship and love. Influenced by it, I wrote this (in my 'After the Rain - How the West Lost the East'): 'The Balkans is the unconscious of the world...It is here that the repressed memories of history, its traumas and fears and images reside. It is here that the psychodynamics of humanity - the tectonic clash between Rome and Byzantium, West and East, Judeo-Christianity and Islam - is still easily discernible.' Thank you, Rebecca West. Sam Vaknin, author of 'After the Rain - How the West Lost the East'.

A must read if your traveling in the Balkans - Rated
After reading some of the history of the Balkans, all other authors recommended this book, and after reading it I can see why. It is the format others try to obtain. She keeps the reader waiting for the next corner in not only her travels but in history. It puts into perspective todays turmoil.

The Greatest Travel Book Ever Written - Rated
This book is, without a doubt, the greatest travel book ever written. Encylopaedic in its depth and scope, it is the vastly readable account of Dame Rebecca West's pre-war journeys through the Balkans. But it is more than a mere travelogue--it says much about the human predicament in general. It is impossible to understand the current problems in the former Yugoslavia without this book.