Croatia & Slovenia: 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. For a thorough explanation of how and why Yugoslavia broke apart, read Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (by Laura Silber and Allan Little).
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 (the book Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, noted above, was a companion piece to this film). 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 Armin (2007); How the War Started on My Island (1996); Underground (1995); and Tito and Me (1992).
For up-to-date specifics, see the latest edition of the Rick Steves' Croatia & Slovenia guidebook. We also offer free-spirited tours of Eastern Europe.