Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

The most serious charge against the book is that West’s sympathy for the Serbs curdles into open hostility toward Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Ottoman-era history generally, prejudice dressed up as analysis rather than an even hand. A critic makes the case bluntly: despite five years of writing and eleven hundred pages, “she succeeded only in representing the Serb viewpoint”. Some readers call it worse than one-sided, one flatly labeling it a “virulently racist and Islamophobic tract”. The sheer density of digression into medieval Serbian history breaks readers before they finish, one admitting mid-book that “Rebecca West is starting to seriously suffocate me on Serbian history”. Sweeping judgments about East versus West read as dated bigotry by today’s standards, and specific passages minimizing child marriage among the Roma communities she visits are genuinely hard to get past now.