Croatia & Slovenia: More Recommended Reading and Viewing
Books
Lonnie Johnson's Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends is the best history overview of Croatia, Slovenia, and their neighboring countries. Rebecca West's classic, bricklike Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is the definitive travelogue of the Yugoslav lands (written during a journey between the two World Wars). For a more recent take, Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulić has written a trio of insightful essay collections from a woman's perspective: Café Europa: Life After Communism; The Balkan Express; and How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.
Films
To grasp the wars that shook this region a decade and a half ago, there's no better film than the Slovene-produced No Man's Land, which won the 2002 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. The BBC produced a remarkable (but difficult-to-find) six-hour documentary series called The Death of Yugoslavia, featuring actual interviews with all of the key players. Croatian films worth watching include Border Post (2006), about various Yugoslav soldiers working together just before the war broke out, and When Father Was Away on Business (1985), about a prisoner on the Tito-era gulag island of Goli Otok, near Rab. Other local movies worth watching include How the War Started on My Island (1996); Underground (1995); and Tito and Me (1992).
For lots more information, check out our best-selling Rick Steves' Croatia & Slovenia guidebook — or join us on one of our free-spirited tours in Europe.