Balkan Ghosts
by Robert Kaplan
Why the Balkans keep breaking, explained.
you watched the Yugoslav wars and couldn't understand how neighbors could do that to each other
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Kaplan traveled through the former Yugoslavia, Greece, and Romania in the late 1980s and wrote this as a dispatch from inside the historical fault lines that would shortly produce the worst European atrocities since the Second World War. When Yugoslavia collapsed, Bill Clinton reportedly read this book. It has been criticized for being too fatalistic about the region's capacity for violence — but as a dispatch from inside the specific histories that made the wars possible, it remains essential. The book that explains the explosion by tracing the fuse.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Eastern Europe
- Voice
- An outside perspective on Eastern Europe
- Themes
- Atrocity Unmasked
