2.5/5

You can blame Goodreads for this rating being rounded down rather than up. Anything three-starred or higher gets churned up in a 'liked it' mash and spewed forth on recommendations that have nothing to do with why I read the book in the first place and everything to do with sucking up to the capitalism machine. If I could get some assurance of my rating having the nuance of 'found it useful despite all odious efforts to the contrary', I'd bother with the effort of joining in with the percentage points that are on the side of yay rather than nay and play its own small role in the advertising juggernaut. As it stands, this book is already suffering from a preponderance of overblown praise intent on selling it to all and sundry without the slightest consideration for how all and sundry may differ from this book's optimal reader, who will be white, well off, and think that Trump really gets the United States. Anyone offended by that last one should take a good look at West and her utter refusal to see where her ideologies and those of her nightmarish Nazis and Facists are in such delightful agreement.

I did not greatly care what he thought of me, for I was too greatly interested in him, and any personal relations between us could not aid my interest, for I could get everything out of him that I could ever get by watching him.

That, and some history that was the only redeeming factor for this read by way of utmost usefulness, is the entirety of the book. West goes, West sees, West writes some fanfiction that coagulates around fingers in too many pies and results in some virulently racist and Islamophobic tract whose worth lies only in the few facts that manage to slip past her sentimental grasp. If you took Tolstoy's epilogue to War and Peace and expanded it to 1150 of the 1400+ pages, you'd get a sense of flavor of disgruntled whining filling hundreds upon hundreds of pages; one obsessed with the threat of a literate proletariat, the other convinced that queer people are the reason for everything going wrong in the world. The commentaries on imperialism, nationalism, capitalism, and oppression are aborted by West's tendency to treat with everything as types, rather than facts: "Americans" are wishy washy white liberals with paranoid tendencies, the British Empire has mostly redeeming qualities while the Ottoman Empire was nothing but stagnant filth, and it's the industrial workers that are to blame for Hitler and Mussolini, not the veins of hatred that have been carefully cultivated for centuries by both the European powers and every nation they have spawned. Only a few of the broad sides caused by her continued and defensive thrusting her head in the sand, mind you. She makes apologisms for everything from anti-Semitism to pedophilia, and whatever prose style she has works more to obfuscate her have-her-cake-and-eat-it-too attitude towards the oh so poor but manly Slavs, the sadly neglected but obviously blood inherited aesthetics of the Byzantine Empire, and the Catholic/Orthodox tradition. The fact that I better understand the aspects of religious piety the title of this work refers than she does is sad, to say the least. All that reading, and she couldn't even spare a glance for the hagiographies of female saints? The closest she got was Saint Monica, who wasn't even referred to by name and was probably only appreciated with how she kept her husband a 'true' man and insured her son is remembered to this day.

The worst part about this books is I have no idea where to go from here. I can't trust the bibliography, as West's characterizing of epistemological worth relies on little more than on how well she can mold whatever she comes across into some drama of stereotypes and on her pride. Recommendations would be great if I hadn't been led to this work by recommendations in the first place and the compatriot lists below my shelving of this wasn't littered with stars galore and very little serious consideration of values other than how many subjects someone tries to talk about, how well someone writes, and how long their money and self-satisfaction allows them to write. My best bet is to move along the lines of what West admitted to, such as the history of Islam and Turkey (the two are not identical) in southeastern Europe, the Romani (you don't get to say g*psy unless you are Romani. It's a slur, and the hatred is alive and well as evidenced in the white washing that happened in Avengers 2 and films subsequent to that), and history actually written by those with some investiture in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia, beyond some trite approval of tourist souvenirs and a desire to do some novel "noble savage" writing that hadn't already been taken up by Bird and Blixen.

By the end of this book, Constantine, West's officiating friend and knowledgeable tour guide, has had a physically noticeable breakdown that results in, among other things, an increased antagonism towards his English wanderlusters. West chalks it up to his wife's antisemitism (a wife that West blames for everything from Nazis to the denial of world peace) and remains content in the belief that they would be in Constantine's good graces if he was in his right mind. If West had been reading even a fraction of the trash she had written aloud to her Serbian thinker, the only surprise is that his patience didn't run out sooner.

Why should Western cretins drool their spittle on our sacred things?

There's nothing like finishing off some monstrous entity to the point that naysayers cannot use lack of completion as leverage for enforcing their own opinionated acceptance onto oneself.