Publisher's Synopsis
In Balkan Ghosts, Robert D. Kaplan offers and eloquent and incisive exploration into the heart of what he calls history's cauldron' - the Balkans - where twentieth-century history began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, and where the eyes of the world are focused as the century draws to a close. Kaplan's odyssey took him from Vienna to near Istanbul; through southern Austria and Croatia, Old Serbia and Albania; to the historical chaos of Macedonia; to the mountains of Romania and the Byzantine mysteries of Bulgaria; and to the most famous but least understood of Balkan countries, Greece. Balkan Ghosts moves from city to countryside, travelling by rail, river boat and hitchhiker's thumb, but is more than travel writing as Kaplan uses landscape to reveal the very process of history and takes the reader inside the minds of people struggling to free themselves from the bloody past. 'This is one of the precious few works that allows a Western reader into the tortured soul of the Balkan peoples. Thoroughly captivating . . . Kaplan is a master of the genre' Library Journal 'His prose is vivid, controlled, and sensitive' New Yorker.
