Land Without Justice

Book Description

The autobiography of the youth of the former Vice Presiden of Yugoslovia, which is also the story of a little-know land, Montenegro. Introduction and notes by William Jovanovich. Translated by Michael B. Petrovich.

Customer Reviews:

neglected classic of yugoslavia.......2002-03-27

Having just read Halberstam's latest book, mostly on Yugoslavia, I was tempted to look into the history of that former country. I found this book on my shelf and gobbled it up in one sitting.

It is the story of Djilas' family in Montenegro, from before the 1st World War until after the revolution that brought Tito to power. It is truly brilliant autobio and also give great insights into the passions that Tito's death helped to unleash in the region.

First, Djilas' family was a kind of local gentry, with leadership responsibilities as well as blood debts to pay. As a child, Djilis had to worry for his father's life, which was threatened by retribution. It is hard to imagine how a grade-school kid survived that psychologically whole and in the end was the one to end the cycle of revenge-feuds. He brings these anxieties to life in chilling detail.

Second, there are the destructive impulses - pathologies, really - that infected everything in Baakan life. This included his father's shame in the memory that he was called on to participate in the massacre of a peaceful muslim village nearby, which is horrifically described, as well as the long discussions with his would-be killers who staked out his house at night. You will really feel them when you read this.

Third, there is the death of Montenegro's independence as a nation, which forms the backdrop to the book. It demonstrates how shaky the foundation of the nation was and how little Tito did to help overcome these divisions in spite of his caudillo-like rule over almost 40 years.

What emerges in this book is how truly great a writer Djilas was, one of the best European writers of the 20C in my opinion. I could not read it in the original, but the translation is simply wonderful. SO many phrases combine wisdom and elegant succinctness, such as: "the story of a family is the story of a land." While he might have been a bit self-serving - he was a dissident who started out as Tito's propaganda minister - Djilas portrays himself as a tolerant humanist and democrat in this book. His voice will be missed as one of reason for that troubled region.

Highest recommendation. You enter a world long departed and yet, as recent events show, still determining the tragedies of the present.

Land Without Justice.......2000-01-17

Born in Montenegro in 1911, Milovan Djilas saw his homeland folded into the communist built nation of Yugoslavia. In deceptively simple, yet lyrical, prose he explains the political, religious and racial feuds that play a crucial role in the region's history. Rising to leadership in the communist party, Djilas was later expelled from the party and imprisoned for "slandering Yugoslavia" a.k.a. speaking his mind. This is a rich, intense and unforgettable book that sheds light on the past as on the continuing saga of the Balkans.

Average customer rating:

Land Without Justice
Milovan Djilas
Manufacturer: Harcourt Brace
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000O5X5UI

Average customer rating:

Land Without Justice
Milovan Djilas
Manufacturer: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000J66NQA

LAND WITHOUT JUSTICE An autobiography of his youth.

Average customer rating:

LAND WITHOUT JUSTICE An autobiography of his youth.
Milovan (Introduction and Notes by William Jovanovich) Djilas
Manufacturer: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0000CK3MG

Land Without Justice. Introd. and Notes By William Jovanovich

Average customer rating:

Land Without Justice. Introd. and Notes By William Jovanovich
Milovan Djilas
Manufacturer: Harcourt Brace
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000JV37F0

Average customer rating:

Land Without Justice
Milovan Djilas; Introduction And Notes William Jovanovich
Manufacturer: HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000R0EEF0

Average customer rating:

Land Without Justice
Milovan Dilas
Manufacturer: Harcourt
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OJCK82

Average customer rating:

Land without justice. Introd. and notes by William Jovanovich
Milovan Djilas
Manufacturer: Harcourt Brace
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000NWHITQ

Book Description

“If you are already a committed Janice Holt Giles reader, in Wellspring you will be re-visiting familiar and hospitable territory. If you are a new reader, this book will be a solid introduction to the matter, manner and scope—the wellsprings—of an important American writer. . . . It is, indeed, a treasure box into which Janice Holt Giles has stored shining bits and pieces of her life and career.”—from the foreword by Wade Hall

The 19 selections that make up Wellspring, Giles's last published book before her death in 1979, are a microcosm of her large world. She brings together fiction, nonfiction, autobiography and fictionalized autobiography, revealing behind-the-scenes looks at her life, her family, her love for her adopted state of Kentucky and its people, her politics, her favorite authors, her thoughts on writing, and her views of her own work.

Customer Reviews:

Truly A Gift.......2007-01-21

I purchased this book as a gift for my dad. Janis Holt Giles came to me while doing family research, The Kentuckians was resourced in one family's information so I purchased that book. My dad took it up and read it and has been a Giles fan ever since. From then on every month I have bought a new Giles book for him to read and he enjoys them so. He reads the books in one day then passes them along to anyone who will read them.
He believes Janis Holt Giles to be one of the most gifted writers of all times.I just simply get pleasure from finding him books he loves to read.

Beautiful Character Weaving.......2006-07-09

Janice Holt Giles takes you to a small place in Appalacia and begins weaving a picture of the people, the ways of life, the long time traditions, and the religion that is deep in the heart of the country. She does it in a way that actually made me fall in love with the people and yearn for a simpler life (even though logically, I know I would have a hard time adapting to such a life). It took me a long time to decide to read this book because the cover is not engaging, but once I had started, I had a hard time putting it down!

40 Acres and No Plot.......2004-07-23

This was the worst book I have ever had the misfortune of reading. You see, I had to read it for school. I am 13 years old. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not just a stupid 13 year old who hates everything to do with reading; I LOVE to read. I usually like all the books I read, this is the first one I absolutely hated. No offense to the author or anything, but do people really care how she likes her biscuts? Or does she really think we care about the music for the song "Jesus Hold My Hand"? I mean, give me a break! So those of you who want to read this book, please consider this before wasting your precious money on this excuse for a book.

What a wonderful book!.......2002-05-20

I loved this book because it took me on a journey to a part of the United States that is not known to most readers. And to a time that is not today. And to know people who are unlike any neighbors I have ever had.
I really enjoyed learning the landscape and the problems and the social activities of mountain people. Someone who lives in an urban area (or the suburbs of an urban area) may feel superior to these characters, feel privileged compared to such country types but I really admired many of the people for coping so well with their circumstances. Many seem heroic, even.
I'd like to say Thank You to this author!

Catchy and Cool.......2000-06-23

You will enjoy reading this.

Customer Reviews:

Beautiful story of childhood innocence and heartbreak.......2006-03-03

"The Plum Thicket" is a beautiful book. In the tradition of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," Giles takes readers on a journey through a child's innocent point of view. By the novel's end, however, that innocent view of the world has been shattered. Set in the early twentieth century in rural Arkansas, the first-person narrator is Katie Rogers, a middle-aged woman visiting the town where her grandparents lived when she was a child. Katie spent many summers at her grandparents' farm, and the entire novel is a flashback to the summer when Katie was 8 years old.

Katie is a bright, intelligent child, the daughter of rather progressive thinkers of the time. She absolutely adores her grandfather, a sweet-natured man who is a veteran of the Civil War, something that Katie is very proud of. However, Katie does not like her grandmother, a cold, bitter woman who resents anything sexual about life. (This fact is a very important part of the plot.) Also present on the Rogers farm is Aunt Maggie, whom Katie idolizes. Aunt Maggie is 30 years old and engaged to the local banker, Adam. However, Aunt Maggie is not eager to marry. She regrets never having attained her dream of being an opera singer, despite the years she spent studying voice in New York City. But Aunt Maggie is a fun, cheerful soul, despite that disappointment. Rounding out the farm are Lulie, the cook/maid of both black and white ancestry, and Choctaw, the farm hand who is three-quarters Choctaw Indian and one-quarter black. (Racial and ethnic heritage also play a role in the book's plot.)

The character that the book's climax hinges on, however, is the new physician in town, Doctor Jim. Jim is a restless, immoral soul who dreamed of being a famous concert pianist but, like Aunt Maggie, was not successful in his attempt at a musical career. Maggie and Jim share that common ground, and Maggie feels attracted to Jim, but she is also repulsed by his drinking, womanizing, and lack of respect for others.

Katie sees a lot of things during that life-changing summer, and to me it's always fascinating to read a novel told from a child's point of view. Katie muses on the differences between Lulie's black Baptist brush arbor meetings and her own family's traditional Methodist church services; her Aunt Maggie's love and respect for Adam versus her love/hate relationship with Doctor Jim; Lulie's comments about the wilder side of life; her grandmother's bitterness; her grandfather's comments about the Confederacy; and a host of other topics.

This novel was one of those books that made me sit and think after I'd read the last page. The novel was bittersweet with a heartbreaking turn of events at the end, but it's definitely an excellent work.

I read Plum Thicket.......2005-05-21

I was enthralled by this book, and literally could not put it down...the beautifully descriptive writing, the sensitivity of the real life characters, the drama in the book. The book kept me spell-bound to the end, and the last fifty pages was a novel in itself. Blew me out of the water. Writing at its best. I highly recommend it!

Customer Reviews:

History-Makers as People.......2006-03-04

When contemplating "history" it's easy to forget that to the participants it was nothing of the kind, but simply their daily lives. The charm and delight of this splendid book is the intimate view of the lives its historic figures were living while they made history-at once instructive and highly entertaining. It's also a great continuing love story, all seen through the letters between John and Sarah Jay, plus a mix of letters to and from family members and other figures of historic moment like Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin and Adams (John, Samuel, John Quincy and Abigail). It's tied together with just the right amount of editorial comment, never intrusive, always helpful and succinct, giving us background and amplification just when we need it, including illuminating details about the Jay and Livingston families and the times they lived in-all presented in a most readable format, illustrated with engravings and a wonderful color portrait on the cover of John and Sarah.

Their lives were entwined with the very matter of our country. They married as the Revolution was brewing, in mid-1774, and were almost immediately separated, occasioning the first letter we see from John to "Sally," as he called her, when he was chosen as one of four delegates from New York to the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia. John would go on, of course, to co-author the "Federalist Papers" with Hamilton and Madison, become the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, governor of New York, our country's envoy to Spain, raising funds to support the war, a negotiator with Franklin and John Adams in Paris to end the war, then, at Washington's urgent request, negotiator of what would be the controversial "Jay Treaty," averting renewed war with Britain. Sarah came from a distinguished colonial family, her mother a van Brugh, New York patroons, her father, William Livingston, the first elected governor of New Jersey, her brother Brockholst named a Supreme Court justice by Jefferson.

John Jay's active public life took him away from his Sally often, and they corresponded diligently, the thread through it all the couple's deep abiding love. Her letters to him open, "My dear Mr. Jay" (his to her, "My dear Sally") but that was just the formal fashion of the time. In the body of those letters-along with fascinating details of daily life and family-we find "good night, my love," "my dearest of best friends," and "Oh my dr. Mr. Jay how I long to see you."

The details of family life are amazingly involving. Sarah reports on her care of family finances, the progress in building a saw-mill, everyone's health, family gossip (when John's brother remarries with what the family considers indecorous haste after his wife's death, they refuse to visit him or his bride)-and makes us care about these matters. John describes his duties and gives us many passing insights into what is now "history" as well as what life was like then (he fears he will not be able to get home from riding the judicial circuit, as planned, because rains have rendered the roads impassable). We see that in many areas of family life, nothing changes over the centuries. Grandparents dote. When Sarah accompanied John to Europe, their son, Peter, stayed with her father. William writes, "...as you desire me to tell you what I think of him, I will give you my Opinion with the greatest impartiality. He really is and without flattery one of the handsomest boys in the whole country..."

In Selected Letters we also get marvelous travel writing, with rich descriptions of places like Martinique and Cadiz. Sarah tells her father how she saw sugar being made. Her brother Brockholst describes Carnival in Nantes (the free and easy Romish ways, and exposed flesh, shocked his prim Protestant Puritanism). In one chatty letter Sarah warns her sister not to heed travelers who laud the beauty of European women: "...believe me it requires a greater degree of beauty to be only passable in America, than to outshine all the Grandees of-I won't say where." She ends that letter with the casual P.S. "Please present my most respectful Compts to General & Mrs. Washington."

There is a great frisson throughout the book when we encounter the many eye-witness views, like that, of the people and events of our country's founding (Sarah's next letter to her sister explores the gossip about Benedict Arnold's treason and notes the widesperead pity for his wife). Sarah dines with Lafayette ("the Marchioness is a most amiable woman"), sees Marie Antoinette at plays and lays aside her own "republican principles" enough to observe that her looks and engaging manner make Sarah "declare her born to be a queen." William writes to his handsome grandson, now off at school "We have good news about a peace, and that king George is forced to lett us alone, and how foolish will the Tory-boys look then, Master Peter?" John writes to offer Washington lodging in New York until presidential accommodations are finished; Washington invites the Jays to the theater. From Paris, Jefferson sends John "samples of the best wines of this country," including "Champagne non mousseux (i.e. still)," which the French reserve for themselves, sending the bubbly to "foreign countries." John assures Washington that the president is the most popular figure in England, excepting only the king-who to John's amazement is still very popular, though "owing to his private rather than his official character."

There are modern resonances, too, throughout the book. John is intrigued by growing commerce with China. Sarah describes how supporters of George Clinton stole a gubernatorial election by invalidating, on a specious technicality, the votes of two counties that would have won it for John. The about-to-be "Federalist Papers" writer gives Washington his views on "What is to be done" about the weakness of the Confederation preceding the Constitution, stressing the importance of separation of powers with its checks and balances: "Let Congress legislate. Let others execute. Let others judge." When John is governor, Hamilton tries unsuccessfully to enlist him in a scheme to steal votes from Jefferson in order to keep "an Athiest in Religion and a Fanatic in politics from the presidency.

Finally, there is a view, seldom discussed, of Northern slavery. In Martinique, on his way to Spain, John "bought a very fine negroe Boy of 15," and he took another with him when he went to negotiate the Jay Treaty. On the other hand, during the stolen election, the Clinton forces attacked John for his strong advocacy of abolition. When young Plato-whom Sarah sends to school, though despairing of his learning much-so misbehaves that Sarah wants him out of the house, he is neither beaten nor "sold down the river" but apprenticed to a merchant. And when Abbe comes down with "a violent Cold," Sarah "prevail'd upon her to remain in bed," even though Sarah, herself, has "not slept for several nights," tending her children through an attack of smallpox. This is slavery-but with a difference.

Its recital epitomizes the intriguing, fly-on-the-wall, honest, moving and engrossing insights that this marvelous book gives us.

delightful.......2006-02-17

How fortunate we are that the correspondence between John Jay and his wife, Sarah Livingston Jay survive and are accessible. The selected correspondence between the two offers a glimpse into their personalities, their roles, their values as well as their hopes and expectations. Through the correspondence one can envision the daily lives of select individuals during this exciting and tumultuous period in our history. In addition one sees a seldom mentioned Sarah, as a devoted wife, mother and friend. A gentile woman who is powerful, independent and capable in managing her household as well as the family farm. The essays on slavery, the mail and medicine and health following the correspondence are concise, informative and as extra bonus. Great read+++++

Wonderful letters.......2005-02-03

This is a great little book: a selection of letters to or from John and Sarah Jay, carefully transcribed and thoughtfully introduced. Many of these letters have never been published before, and through them we get a much stronger sense of the Jay family than we have had before. Sarah, in particular, emerges page by page as a smart, savvy, capable woman, handling the family finances and politics in her husband's frequent absences. The only problem with this book is the steep price, probably too high to reach the wide audience it deserves.

Book Description

The story of a small, integrated group of St. Louisans who carried out sustained campaigns from 1947 to 1957 that were among the earliest in the nation to end racial segregation in public accommodations. Guided by Gandhian principles of nonviolent direct action, the St. Louis Committee of Racial Equality (CORE) conducted negotiations, demonstrations, and sit-ins to secure full rights for the African-American residents of St. Louis.

Average customer rating:

Victories without Violence
A Ruth Fry
Manufacturer: Privately Printed
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000VRHB40

Average customer rating:

Victory without violence
A. Ruth Fry
Manufacturer: s.n
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

War & Peace | Current Events | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B00089VKUW

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books