Balkan Odyssey

Balkan Odyssey PDF Author: David Owen
Publisher: Gollancz
ISBN: 9780575400290
Category : Diplomatic negotiations in international disputes
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description

Balkan Odyssey

Balkan Odyssey PDF Author: David Owen
Publisher: Gollancz
ISBN: 9780575400290
Category : Diplomatic negotiations in international disputes
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description


High Albania

High Albania PDF Author: Mary Edith Durham
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Albania
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Get Book Here

Book Description


The File on H.

The File on H. PDF Author: Ismail Kadare
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 161145994X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the mid-1930s, two Irish Americans travel to the Albanian highlands with an early model of a marvelous invention, the tape recorder. Their mission? To discover how Homer could have composed works as brilliant and as long as The Iliad and The Odyssey without ever putting pen to paper. The answer, they believe, can be found only in Albania, the last remaining habitat of the oral epic. But immediately upon their arrival, the scholars’ seemingly arcane research excites suspicion and puts them at the center of ethnic strife in the Balkans. Mistaken for foreign spies, they are placed under surveillance and are dogged by gossip and intrigue. It isn’t until a fierce-eyed monk from the Serbian side of the mountains makes his appearance that the scholars glimpse the full political import of their search for the key to the Homeric question.

The Balkan Odyssey

The Balkan Odyssey PDF Author: Jason Smart
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781490900063
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Get Book Here

Book Description
Travelling through cities and towns once ravaged by the Balkan Wars, Jason Smart witnesses firsthand the beauty of this much-maligned region. With his friend, Michael, they find out that the Balkans is not a region to avoid; it is a part of Europe to explore and embrace. From the urban sprawl of Belgrade, to the tranquility of a glacial lake in Slovenia, the pair experiences the Balkans up close. Find out how they end up in a rickety clock tower in Macedonia, do battle with a sticky nemesis in Kosovo, and learn that Albania had a king called Zog. The Balkan Odyssey is a journey through every country of the former Yugoslavia (and Albania too). Join Jason as he visits Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania. Jason Smart is a published author, with articles appearing in both magazines and print. Currently he has two other travel books published, together with a book chronicling his journey to become a pilot. Find out more at his website www.theredquest.com.

Lament from Epirus: An Odyssey into Europe's Oldest Surviving Folk Music

Lament from Epirus: An Odyssey into Europe's Oldest Surviving Folk Music PDF Author: Christopher C. King
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039324900X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2018 In the tradition of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Geoff Dyer, a Grammy-winning producer discovers a powerful and ancient folk music tradition. In a gramophone shop in Istanbul, renowned record collector Christopher C. King uncovered some of the strangest—and most hypnotic—sounds he had ever heard. The 78s were immensely moving, seeming to tap into a primal well of emotion inaccessible through contemporary music. The songs, King learned, were from Epirus, an area straddling southern Albania and northwestern Greece and boasting a folk tradition extending back to the pre-Homeric era. To hear this music is to hear the past. Lament from Epirus is an unforgettable journey into a musical obsession, which traces a unique genre back to the roots of song itself. As King hunts for two long-lost virtuosos—one of whom may have committed a murder—he also tells the story of the Roma people who pioneered Epirotic folk music and their descendants who continue the tradition today. King discovers clues to his most profound questions about the function of music in the history of humanity: What is the relationship between music and language? Why do we organize sound as music? Is music superfluous, a mere form of entertainment, or could it be a tool for survival? King’s journey becomes an investigation into song and dance’s role as a means of spiritual healing—and what that may reveal about music’s evolutionary origins.

Ottoman Odyssey

Ottoman Odyssey PDF Author: Alev Scott
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643131664
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book Here

Book Description
An exploration of the contemporary influence of the Ottoman Empire on the wider world, as the author uncovers the new Ottoman legacy across Europe and the Middle East. Alev Scott’s odyssey began when she looked beyond Turkey’s borders for contemporary traces of the Ottoman Empire. Their 800 years of rule ended a century ago—and yet, travelling through twelve countries from Kosovo to Greece to Palestine, she uncovers a legacy that’s vital and relevant; where medieval ethnic diversity meets twenty-first century nationalism—and displaced people seek new identities. It's a story of surprises. An acolyte of Erdogan in Christian-majority Serbia confirms the wide-reaching appeal of his authoritarian leadership. A Druze warlord explains the secretive religious faction in the heart of the Middle East. The palimpsest-like streets of Jerusalem's Old Town hint at the Ottoman co-existence of Muslims and Jews. And in Turkish Cyprus, Alev Scott rediscovers a childhood home. In every community, history is present as a dynamic force. Faced by questions of exile, diaspora and collective memory, Alev Scott searches for answers from the cafes of Beirut to the refugee camps of Lesbos. She uncovers in Erdogan's nouveau-Ottoman Turkey a version of the nostalgic utopias sold to disillusioned voters in Europe and America. And yet—as she relates with compassion, insight, and humor—diversity is the enduring, endangered heart of this fascinating region.

National Deconstruction

National Deconstruction PDF Author: David Campbell
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452903441
Category : Fear
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book Here

Book Description
How did Bosnia, once a polity of intersecting and overlapping identities, come to be understood as an intractable ethnic problem? David Campbell pursues this question -- and its implications for the politics of community, democracy, justice, and multiculturalism -- through readings of media and academic representations of the conflict in Bosnia. National Deconstruction is a rethinking of the meaning of "ethnic/nationalist" violence and a critique of the impoverished discourse of identity politics that crippled the international response to the Bosnian crisis. Rather than assuming the preexistence of an entity called Bosnia, Campbell considers the complex array of historical, statistical, cartographic, and other practices through which the definitions of Bosnia have come to be. These practices traverse a continuum of political spaces, from the bodies of individuals and the corporate body of the former Yugoslavia to the international bodies of the world community. Among the book's many original disclosures, arrived at through a critical reading of international diplomacy, is the shared identity politics of the peacemakers and paramilitaries. Equally significant is Campbell's conclusion that the international response to the Bosnian war was hamstrung by the poverty of Western thought on the politics of heterogeneous communities. Indeed, he contends that Europe and the United States intervened in Bosnia not to save the ideal of multiculturalism abroad but rather to shore up the nationalist imaginary so as to contain the ideal of multiculturalism at home. By bringing to the fore the concern with ethics, politics, and responsibility contained in more traditional accounts of the Bosnianwar, this book is a major statement on the inherently ethical and political assumptions of deconstructive thought -- and the reworkings of the politics of community it enables.

My Father’s Books

My Father’s Books PDF Author: Luan Starova
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299287939
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
In My Father’s Books, the first volume in Luan Starova’s multivolume Balkan Saga, he explores themes of history, displacement, and identity under three turbulent regimes—Ottoman, Fascist, and Stalinist—in the twentieth century. Weaving a story from the threads of his parents’ lives from 1926 to 1976, he offers a child’s-eye view of personal relationships in shifting political landscapes and an elegiac reminder of the enduring power of books to sustain a literate culture. Through lyrical waves of memory, Starova reveals his family’s overlapping religious, linguistic, national, and cultural histories. His father left Constantinople as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and the young family fled from Albania to Yugoslav Macedonia when Luan was a boy. His parents, cosmopolitan and well-traveled in their youth, and steeped in the cultures of both Orient and Occident, find themselves raising their children in yet another stagnant and repressive state. Against this backdrop, Starova remembers the protected spaces of his childhood—his mother’s walled garden, his father’s library, the cupboard holding the rarest and most precious of his father’s books. Preserving a lost heritage, these books also open up a world that seems wide, deep, and boundless.

The Tiger's Wife

The Tiger's Wife PDF Author: Téa Obreht
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679604367
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • The instant classic debut novel from the author of Inland and The Morningside, hailed as “a thrilling beginning to what will certainly be a great literary career” (Elle) “Spectacular . . . [Téa Obreht] spins a tale of such marvel and magic in a literary voice so enchanting that the mesmerized reader wants her never to stop.”—Entertainment Weekly “Not since Zadie Smith has a young writer arrived with such power and grace.”—Time ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times; Entertainment Weekly; The Christian Science Monitor; The Kansas City Star; Library Journal In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife. Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, hailed by Colum McCann as “the most thrilling literary discovery in years,” has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Economist, Vogue, Slate, Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, Dayton Daily News, Publishers Weekly, Alan Cheuse, NPR’s All Things Considered

The Bosnia List

The Bosnia List PDF Author: Kenan Trebincevic
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101631805
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
A young survivor of the Bosnian War returns to his homeland to confront the people who betrayed his family. The story behind the YA novel World in Between: Based on a True Refugee Story. At age eleven, Kenan Trebincevic was a happy, karate-loving kid living with his family in the quiet Eastern European town of Brcko. Then, in the spring of 1992, war broke out and his friends, neighbors and teammates all turned on him. Pero - Kenan's beloved karate coach - showed up at his door with an AK-47 - screaming: "You have one hour to leave or be killed!" Kenan’s only crime: he was Muslim. This poignant, searing memoir chronicles Kenan’s miraculous escape from the brutal ethnic cleansing campaign that swept the former Yugoslavia. After two decades in the United States, Kenan honors his father’s wish to visit their homeland, making a list of what he wants to do there. Kenan decides to confront the former next door neighbor who stole from his mother, see the concentration camp where his Dad and brother were imprisoned and stand on the grave of his first betrayer to make sure he’s really dead. Back in the land of his birth, Kenan finds something more powerful—and shocking—than revenge.