Slovenia Books

My wife and I went to Croatia and Slovenia in September 2007. This was an excellent guide. We loved the fact that it was completely up to date

I was in Montenegro for business and took a 3-day trip to see Dubrovnik. This guidebook was excellent for seeing the town. You don't need any other guidebook. Additionally, it was perfect for touring the "Bay of Kotor" area of Montenegro, which is a popular day-trip from Dubrovnik.

I have used several guide books for each international trip and Rick Steves always has the most useful information for someone looking for a fun but affordable trip. He picks the best values for the money, and always knows where the locals go. The best was a little cafe in Aix en Provence where we went for lunch, and as we were sitting, Rick Steves walked by with his film crew, so we all ran out and had him sign our Rick Steves' Provence books!

Rick Steves knows Europe and how to convey his insightful comments in an entertaining way. I read the book cover to cover without being bored or inundated with any useless data....everything was relevant. Highly recommended.

I used Rick Steve's throughout Germany and Belgium and his tips and recommendations were spot on. We are now planning a trip to Italy and Croatia and I am once again, using his money & time saving tips, and recommendations on where to stay.

If you want to be simply a tourist, then Rick Steve's is not for you. If you want to truly experience a culture and have a great time then use his book.

This is the best book I have ever read. It has really restored my faith and changed my life. I met the son Yanni and he is truly a faithful man. I did not know anyone with such a string faith. The story really makes you appreciate what we have.

This book is a biography about a husband and wife who truly understand and believe in the power of prayer. I've read so many "how to" books on prayer, but this story tells the true life experiences of a woman so close to God, that she knows her prayers will be answered, she prays without ceasing, and has the faith of a mustard seed. Set in Yugoslavia around WWII, the reader is moved to truly appreciate all that God has supplied. Great story. A little hard to follow at first with the foreign names and places, but stick to it. Life changing reading.

This book was, by far, the most moving, challenging, and faith inspiring books I've ever read. It is a must read for every Christian!

This is the most inspirational book I have ever read. My heart was broken and convicted so deeply as I read of the prayer-lives of the invidividuals within its pages. May it challenge you as it has me.

Of Whom The World Was Not Worthy, by Marie Chapian, is one of the most moving books I have read during my Christian walk. It truly lives up to it's name, because the family described in this book, primarily Jacob Kovac and his wife, Jozeca, were truly of whom the world was not worthy. The faith that they held on to, while enduring one of the most horrific times our world has ever seen, is truly awe inspiring. I'm still amazed at how Jozeca managed to have three children under the circumstances she lived in. Especially the second child which she gave birth to during the war. She was on the battlefield away from her husband and family and stayed there supporting the resistance effort until she went into labor. Jozeca was a woman of prayer, and the LORD Jesus heard and answered her prayers. This book is truly a reminder that our God is an awesome God and "For with God nothing shall be impossible."(Luke 1:37). This book was wonderful to read and if you are going through any faith trials right now, just read this book and it will help you get a new perspective on your situation.

This book is a book for the ledgends. I loved this book, which suprised me because I did not expect to. The sense of history and the stuggle of the woman sprit kept me up all night. Way to go

This is a wonderful story. It is educational, and at the same time entertaining. Honest, fulfilling, and a great story relaying things we all think about but are afraid to talk about. I highly recommend!!

I enjoyed reading this book. A neat topic with educational value, in addition to a great story.

For a historical fiction lover, this book has it all. Not only does it engross the reader with the fascinating early history of reproductive rights, but it also takes you on a journey through the first World War, the influenza epidemic and the political upheavals of the early 20th century.

The author is truly gifted in the craft, and it's regrettable that she doesn't get as much publicity as Phillipa Gregory, Margaret George and the like, because she is one of their equals, if not even better. Certainly, Colter shows a greater breadth and depth of research than the average historical fiction author.

Anyone interested in learning about Zizek should read this book. It is lively and accessible, a perfect way to get acquainted with a daunting thinker who writes faster than most of us read.

In order to familiarize yourself with the thoughts and strategies of any critic or philosopher without being exposed to the sufferings sustained in the painful job of reading extremely complex texts, you should always focus on the interviews made with the critic or the philosopher. You will get a much better grasp of highly complicated ideas suggested by philosophers such as Sartre, Foucault, and Said by reading through their published interviews. I mention those three authors for it has been claimed by some reviewers that they have turned the activity of giving an interview into an artform. Daly's interviews with Zizek does not spare us from Zizek's playful, and at times elusive, style when he goes down on Kinder chocolate, virtual reality, globalization, Hitchcock, Fight Club, etc... Zizek is as quick and as versatile as you may have imagined him to be from his previous books or lectures. Daly seems to know to press the right buttons in order to get Zizek off the ground. The chemistry in this book makes even Deleuze sound as a wild and attractive philosopher. However, you should beware Zizek's Lacan is quite different from the clinical readings of Lacan. It became quite clear already in 1989 in "the Sublime Object of Ideology" that Zizek preferred to focus on the underestimated Real in the Lacanian cognitive edifice. Daly explains in a very lucid way the importance of the Real to Zizek's Lacan, and he helps the reader to enter Zizek's streams of thought. This book helps any reader to understand Zizek's highly complex ideas in a very simple way. I would place this book among the other books of interviews made with the authors mentioned above, Sartre, Foucault, and Said. Daly and Zizek are preserving the artform.

Previous to reading this book I had read quite a few of Zizek's books, as well as some other secondary material on Lacan, and always seemed to miss the mark on some key conceptual understandings. They were always too technical, above my head, or hard to understand. In this book, by contrast, and probably in part because it's in an interview format, Zizek does an incredible job of succinctly explaining difficult Lacanian concepts in easy to understand terms. He also outlines his vision of politics and ethics, although if you want to see him defending his politics at his best, I reccomend Revolution at the Gates. The first part of the book also has the added bonus of giving alot of biographical information about Zizek, which, quite frankly, I couldn't care less about, but theory-heads might enjoy the story of his life. Daly also does a pretty good job explaining Zizek's interpretation of Lacan in the introduction - at least far better than most secondary material on Zizek. A great read if you want to get to understand Zizek and Lacan better but have had difficulty understanding his other books.

I was delighted with this stamp catalogue.The layout is fabulous and stamps are in colour so much easier to catalogue.I would highly recommend this product.Price was terrific and delivery speedy what more could a person want.

It was very informative. I really like the color photographs of the stamps. it is much easier to identify the stamps.

"Cry Bosnia" is definitely a good "coffee table book"- it's oversized and has lots of photographs. At the same time, it's so much more. "Cry Bosnia" tells the sad story of the Bosnian War, which is now fading from the collective memory in the face of the Iraq War, in the words of the people who were there. Through Paul Harris' haunting photos and his interviewees, we see how the world stood by as the strong took advantage of the weak. If you're interested in the Bosnian War, contemporary history, or human drama generally, then this book is for you.

I found this book hidden in the corner of the post exchange on Eagle Base in Tuzla. From the moment I opened its pages I knew that I would never put it down. Many volumes speak about the political, social, economic and ethnic divisions which caused the war in the Balkans. Cry Bosnia is not a dry history book which feeds the intellect with numerous facts and figures. Paul Harris, through his photography, has allowed the people of the region speak to us through their hearts. It is through the pictures and commentary that Cry Bosnia speaks to the hearts and minds of those distant witnesses of the Balkan War.

Harris doesn't spare us as he shows us the pictures of both human and physical destruction of a land of beauty. When we view those pictures we see faces of grief, despair and rage. At the same time we see hope, courage, laughter and the spirit of tenaciousness as a people attempt to rebuild their lives in the midst of a senseless war. When we see these pictures we see the ugliness of our humanity. Bosnia reflects the beast which is within us as the "world" allowed slaughter to go on as is asserted in the text. If anything Cry Bosnia can teach us to move beyond our negative spirits and recover the good from within us. Such a reflection from a war should move us to be more accountable to one another as our world gets smaller and smaller.

Part III (75-124) includes Chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 5 (77-105) revisits the economic, cultural and geographic landscape of the village. Portis-Winner offers a detailed account of historical events of the Slovene people. She draws on official records, community's view of future, and survey of cultural texts (recollections, beliefs, tales, myths, autobiographies, and changing beliefs and object meanings), to successfully extrapolate the inner point of view. Chapter 5 concludes with an account of a changing value system in the peasant village.
Chapter 6 (106-124) discusses the immigrant community in Cleveland, Ohio, and should be of great interest to a linguist as it addresses the bilingual aspect of Slovene American culture. The immigrant population shows great attachment to their mother tongue, which has undergone phonological, lexical, and grammatical changes under the influence of a new environment. Portis-Winner delineates member attitudes toward the Slovene language over several migrant generations. Much of Slovene American communication is marked by code switching especially within second generation immigrants. The third generation immigrants however are said to have initially shown embarrassment at their grandparents speaking Slovenian, but later that there was some indication of the younger generation's interest in the revival of the language.
The rest of Chapter 6 elaborates on the survival and upward movement of the Slovene community. The success is ascribed to the traditional values the immigrants brought with them: stubbornness, ingenuity, hard work, loyalty to their tradition, generosity, discipline, honesty and responsibility toward family, kin, and country. Portis-Winner recounts several immigrant narratives, which, she persuasively argues, shed light on the ethnic culture as a part of a larger cultural context. The stories are significant in that they provide reference to the experience and points of view of the Slovene migrant. The indication of transformation is present in a variety of signs, verbal and non-verbal, and may be evidenced in the meaning and significance change for the original signs, the change that points to the similarities and differences between one's ethnic culture and the new environment.
Part IV (125-155) subsumes Chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7 (127-151) surveys the major social and economic changes that bear heavily on the social and psychological state of the two communities in juxtaposition. Portis-Winner shows that global modernization has had an opposing impact on the elder generations between the two communities, while showing much affinity in the impact on the youth. Changes in values and traditions between and within these ethnic communities serve to support Portis-Winner's claim about the dynamic nature of ethnicity, boundaries of which are expanded, crossed, and re-evaluated on constant basis. By analogy, ethnic narrators in this study are seen as human signs indexing ethnicity -- an intertextual and interwoven phenomenon that comprises a complexity of identities. The author further equates ethnic actors with actors in a theater, both of which, she claims, are able to move from one world to another and therefore become transfigured or transnational.
Portis-Winner concludes the book in Chapter 8 (153-155) with a discussion of polysemous and polyfunctional nature of cultural texts. The two main points, which I derive from her study, can be encapsulated in the following thought: 1.) in order for ethnographic studies to be of value, ethnographers must work to unearth the inner point of view and formulate their conclusions after having considered a network of cultural texts, and 2.) every culture and its ethnic identity are amalgams of polysemous and polyfunctional properties of its cultural texts, which are dynamic in nature, and no view of `society' holds permanently true across time and space. Which way a tradition is going to be impacted is unpredictable. Some values and traditions may be maintained, other lost, and still many simply altered to reflect and adapt to the changes of the new environment and the new times.
This book provides a fine synopsis of the essential aspects of a thorough ethnographic study. Portis-Winner set out to conduct a heuristic ethnographic fieldwork study, which in turn provided her with the necessary experience to help define criteria for a better way of conducting ethnographic research. She accomplishes this by intimately studying two related ethnic groups during a span of 30 years. The longitudinal study affords her a quasi-insider perspective of the ethnic group and provides access to invaluable ethnic sources. This is exactly the strength of her approach and only enhances our trust in her evaluation. Because of its multi-disciplinary nature, "Semiotics of Peasants in Transition: Slovene Villagers and Their Ethnic Relatives in America" should be of interest to semioticians, ethnographers, as well as linguists and linguistic anthropologists. I also highly recommend this book to a common reader, who will find the nostalgic essence of the migrants all too familiar.
[Tamara Grivièiæ, University of Colorado, Boulder]

In her book "Semiotics of Peasants in Transition: Slovene Villagers and Their Ethnic Relatives in America," Irene Portis-Winner presents a significant semiotic study that, unlike many previous semiotic studies limited to the analysis of discourse alone, traverses multiple dimensions of cultural texts. Portis-Winner's study comprises a three-decade long fieldwork analysis of transnational and ethnic qualities binding two communities: that of the little peasant village of Žerovnica, Slovenia, and its emigrant population in Cleveland, Ohio and Hibbing, Minnesota. Special attention is also awarded to the question of ethnicity and ethnographer's or author's voice in ethnographic studies. The study considers a broad range of polysemous, multi-vocal, and polyindexical values of cultural texts unbound by time-space continuum, which in turn prompt the author to redefine ethnicity as a dynamic entity not limited by "timeless essence" of individuals but rather free of eternal verity too often ascribed to societies.
The complexity that defines ethnic culture and transnationalism is illustrated through a variety of cultural texts throughout the book. These texts range from: official to non-official history of the area and the villagers, everyday life, beliefs, traditions, economy, power and domination struggle, continuous revival and change of traditions and customs, and how they index the significance of signs. Portis-Winner's study is heuristic in nature because it employs a method that involves finding out what happens within a cultural text, rather then merely being told. The theme of Lotman's unconquerable boundary-crossing cultural hero is carried throughout the book as it is uncovered from personal interviews of reflexive narratives, and interpretive, double-voicing, accounts of the extended human sign.
Chapter 1 (3-27) provides a brief introduction to the economic, social, and geographic properties of Žerovnica, as well as of its landscape, landmarks and inhabitants during the first fieldwork study in the 1960s. The question of inner versus outer (non-member) point of view immediately surfaces as the author warns that the immediate peaceful impression of a harmonious village and its inhabitants is positively deceptive. Tension-ridden relations amongst villagers are discussed and traced to the communist rule and its goal to obliterate peasant autonomy and traditions that were considered a threat to the conglomerate whole. The Chapter also informs of the pervasive hardship and exploitation of the peasants, as well as the imminent impact of global modernization on the village structure following the Slovenia's declaration of independence in 1991.
The author's initial impression of a harmonious community changes after she has spent time within the ethnic community and has gained insight into their traditions and practices. Portis-Winner fervently argues that accuracy of an ethonographer's research relies heavily upon his or her ability to become a quasi-member of the group under investigation. She effectively accomplishes this task through a continuous exposure to a variety of ethnic texts, amongst others, modeling her conclusions after many member perspectives. I consider "Semiotics of Peasants in Transition: Slovene Villagers and Their Ethnic Relatives in America" a testament to the importance of efficient ethnographic work and applaud Portis-Winner's efforts to provide us with such a valuable study.
The last part of Chapter 1 offers a taste of juxtaposition between the member-perceived vibrant and active life of the Slovene emigrant community in Cleveland, their clearly marked attachments to their Slovene village, and the deteriorating, tension-ridden, and mistrustful community of Žerovnica. An initial introduction is made to the changing semiotic aspects of objects and signs brought along by the migrants to the New World. Portis-Winner argues that semiotic changes, from practical to emotive and aesthetic, serve to reinforce the ethnic identity of Slovene Americans.
Part II (28-74) comprises of Chapters 2 through 4. In this section, Portis-Winner provides a rich account of issues pertaining to traditional terminology (with respect to culture, ethnicity, identity and transnationalism) relevant for the understanding of the study at hand. Chapter 3 (43-49) is dedicated to a significant and recurring issue of non-member interpretation of cultural texts and modes of unearthing the communicative objects that are significant in the construction of an inner point of view. Portis-Winner warns about the problem of authorial interpretation of traditions and customs, their usage and changes. She advocates the inner point of view as essential in ethnographic research because it may have different realities and coherence, therefore rendering the uni-dimensional authorial view at best inaccurate and at worst overly simplistic.
Chapter 4 (50-74) offers a detailed overview and discussion of theoretical and practical issues pertaining to ethnographic studies over the decades. It spans views and attitudes of many semiotically-oriented scholars from Saussure, Peirce, The Prague Linguistic Circle headed by Jakobson, Moscow-Tartu School and Bakhtin, to Lotman and others. Each subsection of the chapter introduces a new stance of one of the above-mentioned authors with respect to the analysis and attitudes toward cultural texts. Special attention is afforded to the concepts of sign, symbol, and index; polysemy or mutlivocality of texts; everyday behavior; context (heteroglossia); perception and interpretation of history; as well as the undeniable role of power, which often forces cultural significance onto signs. Portis-Winner substantiates her synopsis with a much-needed critique of the semioticians' attitudes, their respective problems or benefits toward a more wholesome ethnographic study. Reader should be warn that previous knowledge and familiarity with the subject matter are indispensable in understanding of Part II, which is not suited for an average reader.

The sequel to the short story "Travelling Northward", Forde Abroad by John Metcalf (Senior Editor of The Porcupine's Quill) is a superbly crafted short novel that again presents Robert Forde, a writer, aesthete, and henpecked husband (Robert's loving wife rather insistently prefers him to drink tea instead of coffee because it's "better for his health"). Forde Abroad brings Robert from his Ottawa home to Ljubljana in order to attend a meeting of the Literary and Cultural Association of Slovenia. Quirky and engaging personalities range from a professional Serbian language translator, to a gay British expatriate from Sweden who is a Yugoslavian expert, to Forde's longstanding literary correspondent Karla. A literate and thoroughly entertaining story fill the pages of this engaging, brief, and highly recommended work of original fiction.

The Frommer books are all great ways to plan your trip with the kind of information that makes it work for your greatest enjoyment.

Gottschee was a German-speaking feudal domain in the royal Austrian Duchy of Carniola (Herzogtum Krain), which was founded around the year 1300. This feudal domain sat on the southern border of the Holy Roman Empire, later called the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Gottschee 1406-1627 is an authentic look into the life and government of this feudal domain on the frontier of these empires. Drawn from original source documents, and accurately translated into English from 15th century and later German, the book shows the interaction of the subjects, the ruling local nobility, and the government of the Duchy of Carniola, a duchy belonging to the Habsburg emperors. Included is interesting and seldom-seen information on farmers' petitions for redress of grievances; the system of tithes, taxes, and feudal duties; the opening of forest lands for new farms; a 1406 document granting the Gottscheer peasants unique rights not found amongst the peasants of other parts of Europe; military frontier obligations; the Habsburg system of leasing feudal domains to lesser nobles; church and pastoral affairs; and royal management of feudal properties, plus hundreds of ancient Gottscheer village and family names -- the ancestors of a distinct German linguistic group that existed there for over 650 years.

The book is fascinating reading for anyone whose ancestors come from the Gottschee region (now called Kocevje and in south central Slovenia), or who are interested in how the Habsburg emperors managed their personally-owned feudal domains in this remote frontier domain, to include the impact of the Turkish invasions.

Gottschee 1406-1627: Feudal Domain on the Frontier of Empire was beautifully translated into English by Andrew J. Witter, a professional translator, and it gives an most interesting insight into how people lived on Austria's remote frontier.