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Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Penguin Classics Rebecca West Christopher Hitchens 8601422615142 Books

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Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Penguin Classics Rebecca West Christopher Hitchens 8601422615142 Books

Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” ranks as one of the best books of the last century. West chronicles her trips through the Balkans in the late 1930 and she ponders history and people. Besides offering her impressions of the places she visits and the people she meets, West offers her take on her times and how they were shaped. It is a hauntingly beautiful book as she looks at the coming of World War One, the Byzantines, how religions clashed, the growing threat of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy and hundreds of other topics. Her meditations and descriptions are lovely even if West is clearly biased in favor of the Serbs and against the Croats and Austria. The topics she raised are still important and West continues to offer profound insights in a charming and addictive style. Sure this is a long book; it is also one of the best books I have ever come across. Highest recommendation.


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Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Penguin Classics Rebecca West Christopher Hitchens 8601422615142 Books Reviews

I was a fan of Rebecca West before reading this book, and now my admiration is even greater. It is heart-rending and soul-searching; in parts, almost mystical. The wealth of historical detail is staggering, but the context in which these details appear comport with travels to locations connected to them. Despite these events being separated by centuries, they coalesce almost poetically around the places where they occurred.
Great book but I would like to point out a problem with the TOC in the kindle version. I have a paper copy of the book but due to its large size I decided to get the kindle version. I got tired of reading Christopher Hitchen's rather long winded introduction and decided to skip it and get straight to the book itself. The next entry in the TOC was the first chapter, "Journey". I started it and realized something was missing - this wasn't the beginning of the book. I checked my paper copy and saw that the kindle TOC neglected to include an entry for the Prologue. The prologue is about 25 pages long and, I feel, integral to the story. It's included in the kindle version, just not in the TOC. You have to scroll through Hitchen's intro to get to it or you may be able to get to it through the go to location feature. It begins on page 1 (Hitchen's intro has no page numbers.) Just a heads up for people unfamiliar with the book. The missing link has been reported to .
I took on West's multi-faceted book on a friend's recommendation, having little familiarity with the body of her work, just ahead of my own extended trip to Croatia and the region. The massive scope she covers, and the multiple themes explored in detail, easily justify the need to recognize its dated nature and her occasional political bias. Treated as a broadly informative and leisurely read, it was a great companion on the trip (despite its threat to the weight limits on my luggage).
Rebecca West doesn't get to the point quickly but she does an incredible job of interweaving her travelogue with the history of Yugoslavia.
Beautifully written, exuberant, playful, rich with history and personal observation. A great readable marvellous book. A classic. Five stars really. I'm giving it four because I found it easy to put down. (But also to pick up again a month later.) It started to feel a bit overdone when I read long passages. Better in bits and starts. I'm sure it's related to my attention span, and different reading styles today than when it was written. Still, it's a fantastic book.
The prose is divine. I had no special interest in the Balkans before picking up the book. But that didn't matter. I was swept away by West's writing and ability to turn seemingly parochial events into startling insights on man, that giddy thing.

I didn't want it to end.
Like many other reviewers on , I discovered this author and her work through reading Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts A Journey Through History. "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" is certainly a compelling work, full of vivid imagery and references to otherwise unknown or poorly understood historical events but it may, however, not be an entirely objective account. The reader must be aware, however (and it is hard to see how any reader could possibly miss it) that West was not only a Serbophile and an enthusiast for a greater Yugoslavia dominated by Serbia, but also (perhaps unconsciously) willing to stamp her romantic vision of South Slav/Serbian nationalism and idealised peasant society on everyone fated to live in the Balkans. In every respect, West lives in a Manichean world where Serbia is white and any historic adversaries (the defunct Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires in particular) are uniformly black, and while I am sure that it was very easy at times in the 1930's to see much that was dark in Germany, her Germanophilia - in matters large and small - is surely excessive.

Reading "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" I was reminded in different ways of three near contemporary English authors, George Orwell, Wilfred Thesiger and Virginia Woolf. West shares with Orwell broadly similar (strongly held) political positions and a real descriptive power, with Thesiger the innate sense of inquiry coupled with a desire that these picturesque natives should retain their romantic customs pleasing to the English passerby, while with Woolf (who I am admittedly less familiar with - or fond of - than either Orwell or Thesiger) she shares the tendency to superimpose the concerns and perspectives of a very select class of literary-minded upper-class Englishwomen on humanity in general and women in particular.

This may sound like a negative review, but the power of West's writing is such that this is actually quite an engrossing read - the experience of reading it is just somewhat like reading a erudite, interesting (albeit very long) but clearly partisan opinion piece in a newspaper which prefers to promote a "world view" rather than objective. It is still a rewarding read and does provide one particular view of the Former Yugoslavia, but I would caution against forming too many historical or political opinions on this work alone.
Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” ranks as one of the best books of the last century. West chronicles her trips through the Balkans in the late 1930 and she ponders history and people. Besides offering her impressions of the places she visits and the people she meets, West offers her take on her times and how they were shaped. It is a hauntingly beautiful book as she looks at the coming of World War One, the Byzantines, how religions clashed, the growing threat of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy and hundreds of other topics. Her meditations and descriptions are lovely even if West is clearly biased in favor of the Serbs and against the Croats and Austria. The topics she raised are still important and West continues to offer profound insights in a charming and addictive style. Sure this is a long book; it is also one of the best books I have ever come across. Highest recommendation.