Author: Ergasto Ramón Arango Originally published in 1963. Between 1945 and 1951, Belgium faced a crisis in political leadership when its ruling monarch, King Leopold III, was accused of violating the Belgian Constitution during World War II. The question at hand refers to the uncertainty over whether King Leopold III could return to Belgium as king. This book documents the history of this political crisis, culminating with the abdication of King Leopold and the assumption of the crown by Baudouin, Leopold's son.

Author: Lawrence G. Smith When he committed suicide at age forty-one, Cesare Pavese (19081950) was one of Italys best-known writers. A poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator, he had been profoundly influenced in his early years by American literature. But later he grew disaffected with American culture, coming to see it as materialistic and shallow. This book, the first full-length English-language study of Pavese in twenty years, examines his life and the evolution of his views of America through a chronological reading of his works.

Author: Irwin Gellman American diplomacy during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency has received much attention, with one notable exceptionthe United States' relations with Latin America. Irwin Gellman's book corrects this past neglect through a perceptive analysis of FDR's Good Neighbor efforts in Latin America. Based on a fresh examination of State Department records and extensive manuscript sources (including an unprecedented use of Nelson Rockefeller's oral history archives), the book points out the complexities of Good Neighbor diplomacy and its intimate relationship to Roosevelt's global strategies. As background to his discussions of FDR's policies, Gellman looks first at how Latin American affairs were handled during the administrations of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, the three Republicans who preceded Roosevelt in office. Good Neighbor diplomacy, Gellman shows, was not a carryover from these administrations; it bore the distinctive mark of FDR's own making. He then describes how Roosevelt's policy of nonintervention worked, particularly how military force was superseded by more subtle diplomatic maneuverings. Turning to a discussion of economic relations with Latin America, Gellman focuses on how the United States' own situationcut off from international trade by the Depressionencouraged regional expansion. And, finally, he looks at how Roosevelt parlayed the threat of war in Europe and the specter of Nazi penetration in the Americas to further solidify a hemispheric stand. Gellman's account vividly demonstrates that Good Neighbor diplomacy was as much the product of personality as it was of policy. In particular, it emerged out of the rivalries and alliances among three men: Roosevelt; his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull; and Assistant Secretary of State, Sumner Welles. Gellman (the first to have access to FBI files on Welles) characterizes FDR as an astute politician who saw an opportunity to use pan-Americanism to restore America to world prominenceyet could not handle the personality conflicts among those in his own ranks. Gellman shows how tenuous a government policy can be when so much of it depends on personal control and influence.

Author: By Ivana Macek Sarajevo Under Siege offers a richly detailed account of the lived experiences of ordinary people in this multicultural city between 1992 and 1996, during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Moving beyond the shelling, snipers, and shortages, it documents the coping strategies people adopted and the creativity with which they responded to desperate circumstances.Ivana Macek, an anthropologist who grew up in the former Yugoslavia, argues that the division of Bosnians into antagonistic ethnonational groups was the result rather than the cause of the war, a view that was not only generally assumed by Americans and Western Europeans but also deliberately promoted by Serb, Croat, and Muslim nationalist politicians. Nationalist political leaders appealed to ethnoreligious loyalties and sowed mistrust between people who had previously coexisted peacefully in Sarajevo. Normality dissolved and relationships were reconstructed as individuals tried to ascertain who could be trusted.Over time, this ethnography shows, Sarajevans shifted from the shock they felt as civilians in a city under siege into a soldier way of thinking, siding with one group and blaming others for the war. Eventually, they became disillusioned with these simple rationales for suffering and adopted a deserter stance, trying to take moral responsibility for their own choices in spite of their powerless position. The coexistence of these contradictory views reflects the confusion Sarajevans felt in the midst of a chaotic war.Macek respects the subjectivity of her informants and gives Sarajevans' own words a dignity that is not always accorded the viewpoints of ordinary citizens. Combining scholarship on political violence with firsthand observation and telling insights, this book is of vital importance to people who seek to understand the dynamics of armed conflict along ethnonational lines both within and beyond Europe.