The most important thing to remember about the "Macedonian conflict" is that the Greek position has changed dramatically over the past decade. Official Greek government policy was that Macedonia did not exist. When Greece took over Aegean Macedonia in 1913, they killed, tortured and ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Macedonians. They changed the names of people, villages, and landmarks from Macedonian to Greek in their attempts to eradicate the Macedonian name. Two things to remember:

1. It is ironic that Greeks now "love Macedonia" when they tried to eradicate its very existence.

2. If Macedonia has always been Greek, why did the Greek government deny its existence until the 1980's?

Mr. Van Der Leeuw's book is incredibly clear in one thing - his enviable ability to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye. The worst breech of one's responsibility as a scholar is the inability to record objective reality, a failure that is in itself remarkable in the book. Aside from all the overt signs of successful braiwashing that the author has apparently undergone by his Azeri counterparts, he makes such glaring historical and political errors in the book that even a person with no background in history or political science (such as myself) will immediately pick up on them. The range of errors is almost anecdotal, I have never read a book that makes so many on such few pages. I would recommend that Mr. Van Der Leeuw consults a few relatively objective sources - beginning with a simple Britannica consultation about basic facts in the region and revises the book, unless amusement and harmless ironization is the objective of his writing.

I would acttualy give it 0 stars. This book accuses the ming and Qing Emperors as horrible rulers and doesnt mention much about the manchus. it also criticies to much about the Qing Dynasty. Also, the information is OUTDATED/ along woith many words. DO NOT BUY THIS BOKK! DONNT EVEN LOOK AT IT!

This book title is for democratic Republic of Congo, but failed to realize that the flag on the book is of the Republic of Congo. There are two countries with the names of Congo, I will suggest the author to ckeck it out.

I did not like the book. It is poorly written and even more poorly proofread. For a person knowing something about the area, it might be painful to read numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations of the facts. It is a real shame that there are a couple of really good articles (e.g., Yemelyanova or Donskis) mixed together with nationalistic pieces like that of Stepanenko/Sorokopud or pseudo-scholar gibberish like that of Chuprov/Zubok. The editors' lack of understanding of the subject is betrayed by phrases like "Russia's" (not "Soviet," as it should be) "successor states", Ukraine's "rapid economic reform" and by nonsensical assertions about the "stable economic and political situation" in Russia in 1998. Steve Carter apparently does not know that George Vernadsky could borrow the ideas of noosphere from his father Vladimir Vernadsky, who actually authored the term, rather than from Teilhard de Chardin who in his own turn borrowed it from Vernadsky. A condescending and often arrogant attitude of the authors toward what they call the Russian question is unfortunately becoming a rather typical sign of British scholarship on Russia and Eastern Europe. Were it offset by a brilliant scholarship, we might have excused it. A truly sad part of the story is that this kind of an attitude is often exhibited in direct proportion to the degree of one's own personal ignorance in the matters that are supposedly made a subject of expert analysis. Too bad Gellner is no longer around.

Would you shoe me a imfomation of congo include inside capital history. I want to use a interigency of this things for report of subject in university.

Many of the chapters of this book simply include facts. These chapters are of use to anyone interested in studying Russia. However, other chapters concerning topics such as mafia, politics, etc. are either totally inaccurate or not true. Having lived in Moscow for three years studying Russian foreign policy while managing an office, I strongly urge anyone interested in Russian business to "not purchase this book." If you want an accurate account of Russian politics and economy, read The Coming Russian Boom by Layard

I ordered this book thinking it was a "Guide" to Mauritania (as the title indicates). Unfortunately, it was little more than a pamphlet that gave very sketchy information about schools in Mauritania.... totally worthless to me. I would not recommend this book to anyone... WAY overpriced for the very small amount of information that it contains.

The aim of the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission (TRC) was supposedly to reveal the atrocities committed by the apartheid government in the period 1948-1994. However according to a South African advocate, dr. Anthea Jeffreys, 99% of all the hearings did not comply to the necessary criteria to qualify as legally valid. No oaths were taken, cross examinations were highly superficial, evidence was seldom produced, and as much as 16 500 of the hearings were based on heresay and not on personally experienced human rights violations.
This is probably the reason why the crimes of apartheid were not heard inside a bona fide courtroom, for the likely chance that a court might find no support to declare apartheid as a crime against humanity, which obviously did not serve the interests of the ANC government at that time. Official government statistics during apartheid places a question mark on the extreme atrocities apparently committed by this regime. To top it off, the TRC had a survey done and discovered to their chagrin that 40% of all South Africans (black to white ratio is 8 to 1) claimed apartheid was "basically a good idea". Mr. Villa-Vicencio's findings are ultimately no more than anti-Afrikaner rantings which have become fashionable ever since Communism started ailing in the early eighties, leaving many left wingers without an ideology, which made them take to heavy anti-apartheid demonstrations to distract the attention from the problems in Eastern Europe and to find a new moral ground to justify themselves. Moreover, hardly any atrocities from British colonials were brought to trail, whilst Afrikaner atrocities were highly exaggerated in the abovementioned heresay.

This book was a disapointing read, with little relevance to the actual situation experienced by millions of South Africans of all colour.

I bought the book and subsequently (almost within minutes, because there is not much there, just one map and a few childish overlays) returned it. This "atlas" has all the look of similar geographical works, probably for schools, published in the former Soviet Union. I think it probably is one of these, and some clever intermediary has uncovered it and tried to dress it up a bit, and sell it for many times its cost. Most of the weight (worth) is in the packaging. The map content is of little or no value. It's shoddy workmanship. To repeat, I'm sure it's recycled, dressed-up for the American consumer, materials from a middle school classroom of the former Soviet Union. Caveat emptor!