The purpose of the project described here was to create a web-accessible database and travel map tracing West’s route that can aid in navigating these threads. Consequently, a straight read-through of the work can make it difficult to follow the many historical and geopolitical threads entangled in the region. Beyond this snapshot in time and place, the book includes detailed historical background reaching back hundreds of years in a region that gave rise to the term balkanization, and at over 1,000 pages in two volumes, the reader (and historian) can become overwhelmed by the depth and breadth of the material. For the historian, West’s book provides insightful observations about the people and places of a lesser-known region of the world just a few short years before the region was devastated by World War Two and subsequent violence. Her obituary in The Times (London) remarked that the work is “as astonishing in its range, in the subtlety and power of its judgement, as it is brilliant in expression”. In the mid-1930s she made several trips to the Balkans to gather materials for her 1941 opus magnum Black Lamb and Grey Falcon – A Journey Through Yugoslavia. Novelist, biographer, journalist, and critic Rebecca West (born Cicily Isabel Fairfield) has been called one of the 20th century’s most brilliant and forceful writers.
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