Buy it from Amazon
| Subtitle | A Journey through Yugoslavia |
| First Written | 1941 |
| Genre | Travel |
| Origin | UK |
| Publisher | Penguin Classics |
| ISBN-10 | 014310490X |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0143104902 |
| My Copy | paperback. I'm cutting this one into smaller sections! |
| First Read | November 29, 2015 |
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
This was recommended to me, and I love it. Half travelogue, one third history lesson, a quarter cultural assessment (and 2% butterscotch ripple, I know), West is an amazing writer that I'd never heard of. I haven't read the whole thing - it's seriously 1200 pages, but I returned the library copy, bought my own, and promptly cut it into separate volumes so I could carry it around and read it.
Noted on January 11, 2016
A hundred and fifty thousand people live in Zagreb, but from the way gossips standing the street it is plain that everybody knows who is going to have a baby and when. This is a lovely spiritual victory over urbanization.
Quoted on January 11, 2016
Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.
Quoted on January 11, 2016
Her question made me remember that the word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.
Quoted on January 11, 2016