SOURCE: Kisslinger, Jerry. “Portraits of Europe's Powder Keg.” New Leader 76, no. 8 (14 June 1993): 17-19.

In the following review, Kisslinger compares and contrasts The Balkan Express to Robert D. Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts.

“Violence was, indeed, all I knew of the Balkans,” Rebecca West wrote in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, describing the stereotypes she held before ever visiting Yugoslavia. A half century later not much has changed. Western images of blood feuds, bombs and pistols in the waist find new confirmation in Croatia and Bosnia. We connect besieged Sarajevo with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, not the Olympics of 1984; hearing the name “Macedonia,” we jump decades to the Balkan Wars or millennia to the conquests of Alexander. It is not hard to understand why, since except for a few folklorists and tourists, we have generally ignored this spectacularly complex region when it was at peace: The powder keg of...