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The author approaches Malcolm's book analytically and synthetically. The strength of Malcolm's book lies in the fact that it is not burdened with controversies of the Balkan historiography and chauvinistic mentality. Malcolm succeeded in demystifying the Kosovo battle (1389) and the "Great Migration of Serbs" (1689), the themes that Serbian historiography is burdened with. Malcom's book successfully exposes the causes of Balkan war, especially of the last one (1991-1999), as a consequence of Serbian hegemonistic ideology and policy. Malcolm's book will help both Serbian and Albanian historians to abandon a romantic approach in writing their histories. However, author could not aree with some of Malcolm's conclusions, such as assumed lack of oppressive measures of the Ottomans over local population in Kosovo or the argument that there is no Muslim fundamentalism among Albanians because they have an Albanian Christian Democratic Party. Likewise, Malcolm seems to accept the idea that there was a process of "albanisation" of Serbs in Kosovo based on the names of certain number of Albanian population, while at the same time denies that there was an identical process in the opposite direction. The reason for this confusion probably lies in the fact that Malcolm overlooks that it is a question of "albanisation" of Vlachs and not of Serbs. Inspite of these shortcomings. the autor highly recommends the book. (SOI : CSP: S. 571)

The regulation of film exhibition in Iceland has closely shadowed the history of cinema exhibition itself. Although regulation practices have undergone various shifts and realignments throughout the twentieth century, they retained certain core concerns and a basic ideological imperative having to do with child protection and child welfare. Movies were thought to have a disproportionate impact on children, with "impressionable minds" often being invoked. Their interior lives and successful journey towards maturity were put at risk each and every time they encountered unsuitable filmic materials. Thus, while assuming that adults could fend for them-selves among the limited number of theaters in Reykjavík, children were a whole another matter and required protection. Civic bodies were consequently formed and empowered to evaluate and regulate films. But even in the context of fairly rigorous surveillance and codification, the turn taken by regulatory authorities in the 1980s strikes one as exceptional and unprecedented. The Film Certification Board (TFCB) was, for the first time, authorized to prohibit and suppress from distribution films deemed especially malignant and harmful. Motivating this vast expansion of the powers of the regulatory body were concerns about a variety of exploitation and horror films that were being distributed on video, films that were thought to transgress so erroneously in terms of on-screen violence that their mere existence posed a grave threat to children. Two years after finding its role so radical-ly enlarged, TFCB put together a list of 67 "video-nasties", to borrow a term from the very similar but later moral panic that occurred in Britain. Police raids were conducted and every video store in the country was visited in a nation-wide effort to remove the now illegal films from rental stores. This article posits that the icelandic nasties list can be viewed as something of a unique testament to the extent to which the meaning, aesthetic coherence and the affect of cultural objects is constructed in the process of reception, while also main-taining that the process of reception is thoroughly shaped by historical discourses, social class, embedded moral codes and a social system of values, as well as techno-logical progress. in what amounts to a perfect storm of moralizing, political games-manship and the sheer panic of a certain segment of the population, the governing institutions in iceland managed in the span of months to overturn constitutionally protected rights to free speech and privacy, as well as undermine central principles of the republic. Two decades would pass before these setbacks were recuperated, and then only on a legal and institutional level. While analyzing the history of the icelandic video nasties, the article also attempts to grapple with and articulate the symbolic register of the ban, how it speaks to the status of cinema in Iceland at the close of the twentieth century, and what ideological strains, morals and/or values were being put into play and funneled into this particular debate. Then, to close, the role of the most notorious of the nasties, Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980), is examined in the context of media coverage and parliamentary debates at the time.

While the author is impressed by Cornwell's style and presentation, he is appaled by the lack of seriousness exhibited by the author who writes about an imprtant subject (not broached for the first time, by any means) and by demonstrated inability to supress his preconceived notions and even prejudices. Cornwell relies heavily on Owen Chadwick, which assures that he mentions most important facts about the involvement of the Cardinal and Pope Pius XII (whom Cornwell systematicaly entitles by his family name. Pacelli) in contemporary politics, but he bends and ignores Chadwick's research when he makes his judgment about the Pope. Cornwell's treatment of the Catholic Church in the Independent State of Croatia (he gives it an entrie chapter) is a traversy of research and objective writing. His main source. if not the only, for the presentation of the Church in Croatia during the World War II is the 35 years old book by Carlo Falconi. Cornwell perhaps did not know , but he could have and must have been informed, that Falconi wrote his piece on the basis of the propagandistic material given to him by the Yugos]av secrete service and propagandists, which served the purpose of anti-Chatolic propaganda in Yugoslavia. A well intended reader could excuse Cornwell (he does not read Croatian and could not know what some authors wrote about Falconi's sources at the time his book appeared), if he did not point those "Croatian materials" as essential not only for the condemnation of the Croatian Catholic episcopate, but for Pius XII as well. (SOI : CSP: S. 190)