Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding!!!!!
Review: Having served with SFOR in Bosnia-Herzegovina, I can appreciate this work even more. Simple, poignant to the point of heartbreak, and finally triumphant, Bridge On the Drina makes the people of this troubled country come to life. Bravo!
Rating:
Summary: This is an excellent book.
Review: This is a wonderful book about people and their lifes that are influenced not only by other people but by the bridge that conects West and East and still stands today. Everything in lives of these people involves around the bridge, weddings, funerals, summers and winters. The most wonderful portrayal of how a single object can mean a life to people. The main point is that bridges conect the people and cultures.
Rating:
Summary: A Balkan Chronicle
Review: Readers who enjoyed "One Hundred Years of Solitude" will love this book, for while it is similar in feel to that masterpiece, it is broader in scope. Readers looking for insight into the labyrinth of Balkan history will find here a useful starting point. At heart, this is a book about civilization and its changes. It pivots upon the contrast between the small parochial existence of the quiet Bosnian town where the bridge is the central and everlasting feature versus the wider world of Balkan politics where Ottoman Turkey, Orthodox Serbia, and Catholic Austria-Hungary wage a centuries-long battle for political domination. The book chronicles the bridge and the town for over three centuries. It is filled with memorable characters, soldiers, lovers, saloon-keepers, priests, and town leaders. There is the 19th-century schoolmaster who embodies the parochial village so perfectly. He is better-educated than most of the townspeople, but only slightly. This reputed wisdom gives him the arrogance to act as the town historian, a duty he fulfills by keeping a small notebook in which he fails to record historical events. Even the seminal affairs of 1878, when the region was transferred from the Ottomans to the Habsburgs, merits only a few lines in his notebook because he judges that these events are simply not terribly important. And that captures the essence of the book: events in the wider world are deemed unimportant in the village until they come, like the flood in the early pages, in a torrent of change and surprise. Thus does the town evolve, isolated from, yet thoroughly buffeted by, the great historical affairs of the centuries. In the end Pavle the merchant finds that this myopic approach has led him to ruin. Alihodja, whose unique ability to articulate the impact of world politics on the lives of the town's provincials earns him an injured ear and a reputation as an eccentric, never quite realizes how closely his vision entwines his fate with that of the bridge itself. The standard interpretation holds that the bridge is the symbol for the Ottoman Empire, resolute and everlasting, welcoming yet exotic, and built to standards far higher than any to which this little town can aspire. In the original title Andric uses the word for a Turkish bridge (cuprija) and not the standard Serbo-Croatian word for bridge (most). Yet at the same time, the bridge resists this symbolism. It is not a bridge from the past to the future, or from the village to the wider world, or between Christian Europe and Muslim Turkey. It is simply a sturdy stone bridge. While the uncomplicated lives of the townsfolk dip and yaw in full color, and while the ponderous events of the outside world roll on in inscrutable ways, the bridge remains unchanged. The true symbols in the book are the rich and detailed characters who live and die by the Drina river. Each has something to tell us, and none is superfluous. These characters describe for us the consequences of conflict and cooperation in a comfortable little town caught in uncomprehending suffering by its location along one of history's great fault lines. The bridge... the bridge simply spans the Drina, as it always has.
Rating:
Summary: A Historical Masterpiece
Review: Andric (who is not a Serb, by the way, but a Bosnian Croat) is on the money about many causes of the current Balkan conflicts. This book may be too harsh some readers, and is inappropriate for most people who are not familiar with the region; i.e. you may have to read an atlas and a "Yugoslavia" or "Ottoman Empire" entry in an encyclopedia prior to reading _Bridge_. If you like the book, you may also wish to read Andric's "The Damned Yard and Other Stories," as well as his other novels.
Rating:
Summary: Eye-opener
Review: Reading this book makes you excperience the local atmosphere at the highest level you can imagine. Andric can, like no-one else, describe a situation as if you were eyewitness on the scene and you were just about to join a discussion. Beautiful! Do read this at least once!
Rating:
Summary: Perspective is what you get
Review: I was advised to read this book as a way to understanding the Balkans and the culture, as my daughter was born in Romania and I had some experience in dealing with the area. What the book did was underline the complexity of the area and the culture clashes which underscore its history. I especially was struck by the contrast between the Austrians (always DOING) with the towndwellers, who couldn't understand this attitude. I was also taken with the descriptions of the changes coming along and how people took them in their stride or else were perplexed and misled. It helped me understand why it's so hard for that part of the world to let go of its history.
Rating:
Summary: A Bosnian Serb Masterpiece
Review: The hate in Bosnia and the nuturtring of extreme nationalism by all three Bosnian communities - not just the Serbs - has reduced Andric in the Muslim-led part of Bosnia to that of traitor. The Bosnian regime has torn down his statue and he and his work are essentially banned reading in Muslim schools. Such is the tragedy of this demented land that great Noble prize winning works are dismissed becasue of the authors ethnicity. So much for the so-called propoaganda line of the Muslims that they wanted a multiethnic Bosnia. That was the greatest lie of the war. They wanted power and now ban works of art such as "The Bridge on the Drina" because that work is deemed sympathetic to Serbs. Nicholas Tintor
Rating:
Summary: Jugoslavija
Review: Everybody has to remember that Ivo Andric was a Yugoslav winner of the Nobel Prize and if he had been alive in 1991/92 he would certainly have rejected the idea of a creation of a new artificial state called "Bosnia-Herzegovina". I agree that the novel helps understand the complexity of the peoples that live in Bosnia but I disagree and condemn all those so-called Bosnians who try to justify themselves and the creation of their artificial state with this exceptional piece of literary art. Art is universal and should never be used as a means or weapon for new states (whether artificial or not) to claim their relevance. Art should be absolutely preserved in its historical context by everybody and not used or dangerously derivated to obtain acknowledgment of any other nature.
Rating:
Summary: A thought-provoking masterpiece
Review: Andric outlines the history of Bosnia in a series of episodes over three centuries, from the Turkish kidnapping of the young Serbian boy who became an Ottoman vizier to the bridge's destruction in World War I by Austrian artillery. The bridge dominates life in the Bosnian town of Visegrad and, in Andric's hands, assumes a personality. Memorable episodes include the story of Radislav, a Serb ferryman who tries to preserve his livelihood; the beautiful Fata, who uses the bridge to escape an arranged marriage; and the gambler, who bets his life and soul against the devil. The Swedish Academy did not err when it picked Andric for the Nobel Prize. This is a magnificent achievement, and it should not be missed.
Rating:
Summary: Warning
Review: If some people from the "devil's yard" have read this book,Bosnian war may never happened
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