Negative Positive
Title: As the emperor said to Mozart, "Too many notes!"
Review: Or in this case, "Too many words." Among serious books this is the most needlessly verbose and narcissistic I've ever read (exclusive of anything by Proust.) It must be largely fictional since West purportedly repeats verbatim many extremely lengthy and involved conversations and disputes that would only be capable of capture by a tape recorder--and she didn't have one. It is entirely pro-Slavic and tediously anti-German. To West, Gavrilo Pricip is a hero and the Archduke Francis merely a foreign agitator. She includes a vast array of detailed historical anecdotes but leaves one doubtful of her accuracy. She is apparently unaware, for instance, (perhaps deliberately) that the Albanians are not Slavs, that their ancestors were the ancient Illyrians, and that their roots in the Balkans go back to at least 2000 B.C. Some claim to admire her writing style; I found it excessively wordy and personalized.
Is the review positive or negative? 