Customer Rating: 
Summary: But a little too sympathetic?
Comment: Richard West's excellent biography of Tito is also a good history of the Balkans and the suicidal conflicts involving all sides. Mr. West knows his subject very well and provides solid documentation. He does, however, seem oddly sympathetic to Tito, and glosses over some of the tyrant's monstrous behavior, especially his mass murders of Serbians following World War II.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Almost comically misguided and pro-Serbian
Comment: The reader from Zagreb already pointed out some of the many factual errors and erroneous conclusions which this book is rife with. The author seems especially error-prone when straying away from Tito himself to attempt making larger conclusions about the events in the region and their sources and consequences. Instead of picking on little details, I'll just make some helpful recommendations.
If you want insight into Tito and the wartime Partisans, read Milovan Djilas's "Wartime" and Fitzroy McLean's "Eastern Approaches".
For some further (less flattering) insight into Tito postwar, read Ion Mihai Pacepa's "Red Horizons", which is mostly about Rumania and Causescu, but mentions Tito several times, speaking in some detail about the relationship between the two dictators.
If you want insight into the true Serbian role in WW2, read the excellent "Sebia's secret war" by Philip J. Cohen. The facts are readily available, they've just been obscured by the long-discredited postwar propaganda that the author chooses to repeat in this book, for reasons known only to him.
If you want to know about the massive bloody payback that was extracted right after WW2 for the crimes the Ustasha commited during the war, against both them and anyone else implicated by proxy (and just for not being zealous enough politically), read "Operation Slaughterhouse" by Guldescu and Prcela. It's difficult to find, and is a large volume, but if you really want to know, try to find a copy.
If you want to really know how the wars in the former Yugoslavia started, read Laura Silber and Allan Little's excellent "Yugoslavia: Death of a nation". And no, you won't find old-fashioned platitudes about religion and "all of them being savages, so what can we do?" in there.
I can see from some of the other reviews here that this book has already done damage. But if you are really curious about the region and it's history, read the above volumes, and you'll certainly be far better informed than this sadly deficient volume can provide.
Sadly, the author seems keen on repeating old and tired cliches about the region, dating from WW1 (and that weren't particularly true even then), and his thin attempts at excusing the role of the Serbs in the recent wars with moral relativism are almost upsetting (knowing less informed readers might believe such conclusions). After all, if everyone started extracting payback for historical wrongs, we'd be left with a planet of blind people. Such arguments are no excuse, even with the over-inflated claims the author makes about WW2 war crimes, while ignoring the true extent of the crimes of the Chetniks (and their habitual and consistent cooperation with Nazis and Italian Fascists).
As for his claims about Bosnian "fundamentalism", well, he's clearly never actually met a Bosnian Muslim. Or at least, not before the wars, which understandably somewhat tipped people there in a unfortunate direction. Without a shadow of a doubt, no Bosnian would have tolerated Wahhabi vermin among their midst before the horrors of the recent war there. Trying to project minority postwar attitudes backwards is very ill-informed, and just plain wrong.
The author also mentions postwar Ustasha terrorist acts, however, he absurdly seems to think that problem was not dealt with in-country. In fact, it's well known (among those of us with a clue, at any rate), that all Ustasha attempts at postwar infiltration were met with failure and shooting deaths of the participants. Also, agents of the infamous UDBA (Yugoslav secret police) were famous for hunting down both Ustashe and other dissidents worldwide and assasinating them. This is well known. It puzzles me how the author was unaware of the extent of such activities by Tito's secret police.
All that said, I can agree with the conclusion that Tito was the most benevolent of the recent dictators, and he truly did make Yugoslavia a world player while he was in charge. No small achievement, there. Also, the standard of living and personal freedoms (while certainly not maching, say, those of the United States), were better than in all other communist countries. Then again, that was at the expense of massive debts, that had to be paid eventually. But, it was fun while it lasted.
Either way, don't waste time with this volume. Read the others I mentioned if you want true insight.
Customer Rating:
Summary: 3.5 Stars
Comment: Richard West's book on Tito is more than anything, a study of the relationships among the inhabitants of eastern europe rather than a biography. Nevertheless, the book is well written, informative and at many times entertaining. It is crucial to understand the history of the area known to many as the powder keg of europe in order to learn about Tito. West does a good job of depicting the complicated relation between not only Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, etc. but even more importantly - the Muslims, Catholics, Christians, etc. I am glad that West was so staunch in his disapproval of the Ustasha - whose methods repulsed even the Nazis. However, he seems to be one-sided in the sense that Serb extremist atrocities are rarely mentioned and not as detailed. The struggles of Eastern Europes does not have good or bad guys. Both Serb and Croat extremists have performed horrendous acts on their own people and will have to look back on their history with deep sorrow and regret. To be fair, both sides have also had many strong character leaders attempt to end the violence. Many of which paid with their lives. Tito was the only person to unite the region. I wish West had even more access to Tito to provide a better picture but I guess there are other books that are more precise. In the end, the first 3/4 of the book are solid but the last section regarding the state of the Balkans after Tito seems rushed and is rather forgetable.
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Summary: Great history of the Balkins
Comment: This book is very well researched and is one of the only books not to carry any ethnic bias. It is a history review rather than a documentation of Tito the man. It starts just after the Toman Empire collapsed and ends just weeks before the recent fighting of the 1990s.I have been living in Slovenia for the last 3 years and made some travels into Serbia and Croatia. I learned more from this book that the 3 years living here. It is long and somewhat academic but a reasonably easy recreational read.
Do NOT get the other book about Tito (by Djlias)-- this was written for an audience who is interesting in debating Markist philosophy.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Readable bio on the world's only benevolent dictator
Comment: I've racked my brains and the only benevolent dictator I could come up with was Yugoslavia's Marshal Josip Broz Tito. Richard West writes a favourable, even-handed, and comprehensible account of Tito, who ruled Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1980. He even provides a background to the South Slavs before talking about Tito, because it is important to understand the dynamics going on under the Ottoman Empire and later the Balkan absorption by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1878.Tito, a Croat, was indeed born during an interesting period, when tensions were growing in Europe between the two alliance blocs, the Entente and Central Powers. He had his brush with Pan-Slavism, as he went to help the Czechs and Slovaks during his military service.
West also takes time to talk about the Independent State of Croatia, the fascist puppet state under Ante Pavelic, the mastermind of Yugoslavian King Alexander's assassination in 1934. That regime was brutal, as Serbs were butchered, bombed while in worship, and hurled off cliffs. Even the Franciscan priests participated in the killing.
Tito's wartime exploits make interesting reading, as he was besieged from all sides, by Germans, Italians, the Ustasha (Croatian fascists), and monarchist Serbs under Draza Mihailovic. It didn't help matters that the Allies saw Mihailovic as the more viable threat against the Germans. Only when Churchill got information from the code-breaking Ultra did he realize that Tito was the greater danger against the Nazis and hence recognized that they had better give Tito higher priority.
His own brand of Communism, Titoism, was freer than Soviet Russia, Maoist China, or Hoxha's Albania, but also tried to make the various nationalities live together in collective brotherhood. That hope would turn out to be unrealistic, but he did try to clamp down on nationalism. True, he did jail some opponents and nationalists, such as future Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, but he didn't carry out large scale massacres like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. He was one of two "good Communists" in the eyes of the West, the other one being Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania.
His role as one of the leaders of the non-aligned third bloc, along with India's Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser holds relevance today. 11 Sept has made non-alignment a non-option. Unfortunately I haven't seen any countries who have made a firm stance of neutrality.
This book was written before the outbreak of the war in Bosnia despite its publication in 1994. In light of what happened in Bosnia and Kosovo, critics might tear into Tito for keeping the genie of nationalism firmly stoppered. It was a little after a decade when Yugoslavia disintegrated. Like leaders such as Charlemagne and Louis XIV, his death left a leadership vacuum that led to political fragmentation.
