After decades of almost total neglect by Western scholars – Elez Biberaj and Peter Prifti figuring among the handful of Western scholars to write about tensions in Kosovo/a during the 1970s and 1980s – Kosovo has recently become the focus of a continuing flood of books, presaged in 1982 by Jens Reuter's short monograph on the subject and in 1993 by Julie Mertus and Vlatka Mihelić's research into human rights abuses for Helsinki Watch, later augmented by a tome more contemporary in orientation, co-authored by Ivo Daalder and Michael O'Hanlon. Of the thirteen books under review here, four – those edited by Jürgen Elsässer and Thomas Schmid, together with Stefan Troebst's succinct monograph and Joseph Marko's edited collection – focus largely on the crisis of 1997–9 and the international response. Three works under review – those by Julie Mertus, Noel Malcolm, and Miranda Vickers – discuss a longer period of history, with Mertus presenting local views of events over the past thirty years, Vickers surveying the past 400 years, and Malcolm reviewing the past millennium. But the purposes, methodologies, questions, and conclusions of these three works differ radically. Eric Gordy's book endeavours to set forth an argument that Milošević maintained his grip on power over a period of what proved to be thirteen years in all by systematically eliminating alternatives in politics, the media, and popular culture, while Judah examines Milošević's strategy for containing and suppressing Albanian insurrection in Kosovo.