This book comes equipped with the subtitle: "The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia". It would be better subtitled: "How I Feel about Rape, Women, and my Own Interesting Self". It is a silly narcissistic, self-referential volume. It is a pathetic excuse for academic scholarship, where feelings substitute for research, where emotions are facts, and where accusations constitute reality. To call Allen a lazy researcher would not be accurate, she appears to possess abundant energy but doesn't appear inclined to expend any of it in the pursuit of accuracy or substance. She does seem to organize a number of conferences and then shares their details with us, including one particularly ghastly Alpine fantasy in Slovenia. The book is so absurd that I finished it only as one might watch a slow-motion train wreck - appalled at myself for continuing to turn the pages, yet unable to tear myself away from its awfulness. To quote the Critic: this book fills a much-needed gap on the bookshelf.The faults in this book would constitute a book in themselves. Here is an abbreviated list, in no particular order:
Allen spends the FIRST FORTY PAGES of the book discussing how she feels about this topic, and how she plans to approach it. It is not until the third chapter (she indulges in the conceit of calling her chapters `themes' to account for their lack of continuity) that she finally begins a discussion of the substantive issue at hand.
At least she lets us know in the introduction that the book will be tough sledding, when she states that the atrocities in Bosnia are a cognitive problem for her, i.e., she can't believe it because it's so bad. This perspective of the author's feelings and how the war makes her feel is the dominant theme of the book. To say that Allen gets in the way of the book would be inaccurate, since she IS the book.
Allen blithely confesses to her lack of concern for factual accuracy, as in the endnote where she admits that a UN investigator has been unable to confirm the existence of pornographic videotapes of Bosnian rapes. Undeterred, Allen notes "whether they exist in fact or simply as rumor, even the rumor of such tapes is a chilling aspect of this genocide".
In another endnote, she bemoans her inability to find a suitable definition of the word "ethnicity" because she chooses to define it in cultural rather than genetic terms. At the same time, she falls in love with the word "toposcape" which she has invented, using variations of it five times before you finish the first chapter. "Toposcape" doesn't appear in any of my standard dictionaries, but Allen doesn't offer us a definition. It appears to mean alternately `region' or `demographics', or something.
She makes obvious factual errors, on page 15 mistaking the city of Vukovar for the region of Voyvodina, and on page 105 confusing Panama for Nicaragua. She has a shallow understanding of Balkan history, her full and complete explanation for the recent wars is contained in a few lines which read, "Decades of dictatorship created sectors of privilege and oppression that are now being renegotiated by means of war and genocide". This is simply sloppy scholarship. However she needs to be brief in explaining the conflict, because the more space she devotes to politics and history, the less she is able to talk about herself.
In the chapter entitled "Identity", she feels compelled to offer us four pages of background about her Swedish roots, Oakland, and her trip to Sweden. She follows this with a quick paragraph about "M", her Croatian-American interlocutor. It's not difficult to discern the relative importance of characters in this book.
The chapter entitled "Analysis" is little more than an inter-feminist catfight. She spends six pages attacking a 1975 work by Susan Brownmiller, and then another five slamming Croatian feminist Slavenka Drakulic in surprisingly personal terms, referring to her in a note as a "rank opportunist". It's all pretty unseemly, this material would have been better sent in a personal letter to Drakulic.
This is only a partial list of this book's dozens of shortcomings, both of substance and style. Feel free to compile your own list. Allen's explanations are often internally contradictory, and her thesis seems to change from chapter to chapter. In short, this book is junk, self-absorbed nonsense. It has nothing to recommend it, although the cover art is sort of catchy. If you don't read any other books about the Balkans this year, don't read this one either.
