Alfred J. Rieber offers a panoramic political history of the Balkans during World War II through the prism of the well-known leaders who impacted the region and the countries they represented. Rieber's history is the stuff of high politics—diplomatic maneuverings, ideological posturing, and grand strategies—reflecting a lifelong, intimate scholarly fascination with the broad arcs of East European and Russian history. Rieber adopts a meteorological metaphor in organizing his book, splitting it into two parts: “The Storms Breaks” (part 1) and “Wind Rising from the East” (part 2). Part 1, which makes up the bulk of the book, is organized into five chapters, each devoted to one of the five leaders (in sequence): Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, and Tito. As the title suggests, part 2 is devoted to chronicling the wartime roots and subsequent postwar split in 1948 between Tito, the Balkan regional hegemon, and Stalin, the hegemon of the world's communist movements.

Rieber's “leader-centric” approach to the World War II Balkans makes sense in many ways, which he enumerates in a brief few pages in his introduction. All these leaders, including Churchill as the head of the one democracy, “amassed extraordinary powers during the Second World War” (27); all had a certain “charismatic aura”; all “took a direct, personal role in planning and conducting military operations”; and “in the long run” all of them “failed to realize their imperial aims in the Balkans” (31). Colluding against them was the immovable reality of the Balkan's fractured geography, which helped produce what Rieber describes as a “kaleidoscopic mix” (7) of ethnic and religious identities, as well as a long history of foreign intervention and state building that gave kindling to an equally long history of irregular warfare and banditry. Indeed, it is the concise introduction where Rieber's expansive knowledge of the geography and political history of the region reveals itself best, as he proffers a series of vignettes and throughlines tying the ambitions of the World War II leaders with previous imperial projects in the Balkans.

However, there are drawbacks to Rieber's leader-focused structure. A consistent chronological narrative to wartime developments in the Balkans is one of its first casualties, as each chapter winds the clock back to account for the historical context of each leader's and nation's intervention in the region. This context, for example Stalin's juggling of the twin challenges of the interwar capitalist cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe and the growing Nazi domination of Eastern Europe, at times also appeared remote, if not uncoupled, from developments in the Balkans.

There is also a larger methodological question hanging over an analysis of the Balkans through these leaders. With the exception of Tito, the lone native of the region, the Balkans were never of primary political or strategic concern for the remaining four leaders. Rieber reveals that the Adriatic and Western Balkans were stepping stones for Mussolini's larger ambitions in the Mediterranean and beyond, that Hitler only “plunged into the Balkan vortex in reaction to a coup by military officers in Belgrade” (76), that Stalin seemed only erratically interested in the Balkans and then primarily its eastern regions bordering the Soviet Union, and that Churchill's main focus was securing a non-communist Greece to guard the British corridor to the Middle East, Suez, and South Asia. In comparison to Hitler's and Stalin's monstrous expenditure of lives in the “bloodlands” north of the Balkans, the Balkans was a relative sideshow for them and never became, as Rieber noted, “a major field of military operations” (26). By foregrounding Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Churchill in the analysis of the wartime Balkans, leaders who were at various times and in various places disinterested in what was happening in the region, risks diminishing the significance of local agency in shaping the wartime Balkans and their immediate aftermath. Accordingly, the contributions of Greeks, Yugoslavs, and Albanians appear erratically throughout the narrative and at somewhat arbitrary locations. For example, why does an extended inquiry into occupied Greece only appear halfway through the book and in the chapter devoted to Churchill? In addition, relatively little attention is devoted to the role that Bulgarians and Romanians played.

Rieber is on much firmer ground in part 2, observing that “the strategic importance of the region grew steadily as the war progressed” and that “by the end of hostilities it had acquired global proportions” (26). The early Cold War's potential “Hot War” crises along the Italo-Yugoslav and Austro-Yugoslav borders, as well as in Greece and Albania, buttress this interpretation. Rieber's exploration of these events, as well as the detailed examination of the torturous path to the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 and the implosion of Yugoslavia's regional ambitions, clearly extends the conventional periodization of World War II as ending in May 1945. As Rieber rightly notes, “the coming of peace in the rest of Europe did not extend to the Balkans” (27).

Rieber's work is richly researched, with Russian and American archival repositories, as well as additional published primary sources, reflecting the book's focus on political and diplomatic history. A generous number of maps at the outset of the book is a helpful supplement to the Balkan's bewildering geography. Unfortunately, the book was also punctuated by several minor but avoidable spelling errors that should have been caught by the editors. The work's dense narrative assumes that the reader has a solid familiarity with the Balkans and its place in the strategic ambitions of the key protagonists of World War II, and Storms over the Balkans is, therefore, suitable for graduate students and experts in the field.