How long does it take to read The Serbs?
History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia
Tim Judah
The Serbs by Tim Judah takes about 6 hours 53 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 53 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1997. 375 pages, about 103,125 words.
14 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 11 hours 28 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 53 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 18 minutes |
The page count is the median across 10 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
This wide-ranging, scholarly, and highly readable account opens with the windswept fortresses of medieval kings and a battle lost more than six centuries ago that still profoundly influences the Serbs. Judah describes the idea of "Serbdom" that sustained them during centuries of Ottoman rule, the days of glory during the First World War, and the genocide against them during the Second. He examines the tenuous ethnic balance fashioned by Tito and its unraveling after his death. And he reveals how Slobodan Milosevic, later to become president, used a version of history to drive his people to nationalist euphoria. Judah details the way Milosevic prepared for war and provides gripping eyewitness accounts of wartime horrors: the burning villages and "ethnic cleansing," the ignominy of the siege of Sarajevo, and the columns of bedraggled Serb refugees, cynically manipulated and then abandoned once the dream of a Greater Serbia was lost This first in-depth account of life behind Serbian lines is not an apologia but a scrupulous explanation of how the people of a modernizing European state could become among the most reviled of the century. Rejecting the stereotypical image of a bloodthirsty nation, Judah makes the Serbs comprehensible by placing them within the context of their history and their hopes.
Subjects: History, Yugoslav War, Serbs, Causes, History of Yugoslavia, Serbia, history
