Balkan Ghosts

"In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. That November, while the world danced in the rubble of the wall, a journalist named Robert Kaplan was in Kosovo watching a riot between ethnic Serbs and Albanians. The future, Kaplan wrote, was not in a reuniting Germany but in a fragmenting Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia, Kaplan saw the impending collapse of nation states and the rise of a Hobbesian jungle of gang wars, tribal slaughter and ideological jihads. Kaplan, of course, was right."—Porter J. Goss, Director of Central Intelligence

"Important . . . Kaplan is a striking and evocative writer."—The Washington Post

"Mr. Kaplan spares no individual and no nation . . . as he demonstrates his literary powers at their fullest."—The New York Times Book Review

"Kaplan is a striking and evocative writer, and the Balkans offer him all the richness of a García Marquez world, where the fantastic is everyday life."—San Francisco Examiner

"With remarkable clarity, [Kaplan] explains problems that all sides have lived with throughout the long history of the Balkan peninsula . . . Kaplan succeeds in presenting the everyday experience of different Balkan communities in a vivid and significant way. Balkan Ghosts offers the complexity, brutality, and beauty in traveling in both the past and the present."—The Seattle Times

"An often rewarding odyssey filled with vivid writing."—The Wall Street Journal

"Historical perspective makes Kaplan a superb observer . . . He artfully blends his reporter's notes with rich historical reflection."—Business Week

"A well-documented account of the Balkan's past and present . . . Kaplan . . . forcefully illustrates that the irreconcilable differences among Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnians are only one part of the seething ethic, religious, and cultural tensions tearing at a much larger region."—Pittsburgh Post Gazette