Jovana Babović has written an important contribution to our understanding of the development of Belgrade as a cultural center in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in the 1920s and 30s. Her principal focus concerns the role of foreign popular culture in Belgrade and its privileged position in relation to the activity of Serbian or Yugoslav entertainers. Her analysis, amply illustrated by reference to specific cases of certain individuals and the clubs and kafane in which they performed, is contextualized in a broader discussion to demonstrate the appropriation of the means of cultural production by the city's middle class and their aim to dominate the institutional processes underpinning that production. Belgrade's middle-class citizens intended to mold their city in the image of other major European cities and reproduce the aesthetics and values of European modernity.

Chapter 2 of the book charts the appearance of Radio Belgrade and its impact on the city. Outlining its early days as the product of a group of amateurs intent on pursuing the opportunities afforded by the technological advances of the twentieth century, the author examines its ambitious programming policies to include educational broadcasts and public entertainment. Attention is also given to financial planning and subscriptions to be paid by listeners. In Chapter 3, the author discusses the regulation of entertainers and performers within the city, particularly the preferential treatment given to entertainment premises used by the wealthier inhabitants. City administrators applied regulations more rigorously to establishments frequented by the lower classes, regarded as a source of moral corruption, gradually pushing them further toward the city's periphery. The study is best when detailing individual cases from the archives to demonstrate the imbalance in official treatment afforded to different kinds of performers and places with a more benevolent attitude toward foreign artists employed in expensive clubs and cabarets. In the next chapter, “Belgrade's Downtown Leisure District,” the book explores the physical takeover of the city center by the vested interests of the urban elite and its development as a leisure and entertainment area for the rich.

The last two chapters reveal contrasting attitudes to foreign and domestic performers, Josephine Baker and Dragoljub Aleksić. The author discusses Baker's arrival for a week of performances in Belgrade in 1929, giving a full picture of the sensation she caused within the context of her European reception as a whole. On the one hand, Baker's black skin and provocative performance style questioned the norms of Belgrade's comfortable middle-class society. On the other hand, her reputation and acceptance in other European capitals appealed to their desire to embrace all aspects of European modernity. In contrast to her success, Aleksić was a local entertainer who performed strongman acts on the city streets but did not find acceptance among the financiers and promoters of cultural events in Belgrade as he had no appeal to the European values of the city's middle class.

Babović’s book provides a sound analysis of cultural life in Belgrade taken from archive sources on individual performers and the premises where they worked. However, the broader discussion to “show that class interests took precedence over national ones” (5) among the urban elite is not so strong. The author often makes reference to middle-class residents, educated Belgraders, business-minded urbanites, and the like. City administrators are assumed to be representatives of this otherwise amorphous social group. The point, however, is that there was no social group which held a shared set of values or plan for urban gentrification. Belgrade's middle class was constituted by a mixed bag of disparate sub-groups: old city families with varying degrees of wealth, newcomers drawn by speculation in the chaos of the post-war years, and rich industrialists, many of foreign origin. Some of them were educated at universities abroad, and others had minimum formal schooling. Some were right-wing conservatives, others were radical liberals in favor of social reform with even a sprinkling of communists and fellow-travelers. The book gives the impression of an urban elite leading society as city administrators, rich financiers, and makers of public opinion. In reality, the wealthier section of the population was a highly varied and internally stratified community. This study is strong on the development of popular culture in interwar Belgrade but is less illuminating in its discussion of the complex structure and interests of the urban elite.