Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses how West's book sheds light on the wars that marked the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Any reader of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is left with a strong impression of the history of the Balkans as a place of violence, bloodshed, and tragedy. Fifty years after the book's 1941 publication, the region erupted in a new wave of bloodletting that quickly turned into the worst violence in Europe since World War II. Many in the West, who knew little about one of the most unstable regions in the world, turned to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon for an understanding of the roots of the conflict.

The wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s occurred as a result of the demise of communism and the resurfacing of old...