Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (Paperback)

It is an excellent book. Period. Does it tell the full story? Is it 100 percent fair to Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Vojvodians, Kosovars, Macedonians and Slovenes? How can it be. A war is a complex event. Remember that all, that is ALL the UN peacekeepers such as myself all thought each side was as bad as the next. Yes Serbs could be brutal, Croats mean, Moslems retaliatory.........the list goes on. But in terms of a perspective of what went on before this mans eyes? I believe it 100percent because I saw the same thing.

Besides Greece though , Balkan Ghosts focuses on almost all Balkan nations except Slovenia and Turkey . Kaplan examines the region's recent past and presents a potrait of the psychology and the way of thinking of the people living here . You'll probably find his conclusions and notices annoying if you are greek , bulgarian , croatian , romanian and oh my God , especially if you are turkish . Indeed , he does tell you his opinion right to your face ... His writing style is rich and gripping . Despite his virtues as a writter though , his offering is uneven . Some parts of the book , especially the chapters on Romania , although sporadically witty , are simply too confusing to follow . Maybe it's the area's history which is so complicated ... or maybe Kaplan just didn't manage to control his huge amount of information .

Furthermore , what will a reader who has nothing to do with the Balkans receive ? Will he understand the region's unhealed wounds or will he consider the people of the Balkans merciless maniacs who just don't know how to forget and move forward ?

If you are a citizen of a Balkan country , reading Balkan Ghosts is like looking yourself in the mirrow and trying to face your past actions and mistakes . In a way , it's like experiencing a teenager's eternal insecurity too ... " what is true ? What i think i'm like or what the others think i am like ? " . Kaplan has lived and travelled all over the Balkans for many years . He has no reason not to be objective and nowone claims that he isn't . The question is does he have what it takes to deeply understand the Balkans ? Does he have what it takes judge them ?

Quite a few negative reviews I see here were written by natives of the Balkans who think their homelands have been slandered. I note with amusement the American reviewer who pegs them correctly as "tribal" (especially Serbian) types utterly convinced that *they* are the "true" victims of history, profoundly bewildered how any outsider could sympathize at all with their enemies. (Of course, this attitude isn't limited to that part of the world, or even to the poorer parts of the world; Germany has recently been making noises about how it was the "real" victim of WWII.)

Then we have the usual suspects: the politically correct types who decry Kaplan's "racism" or "Eurocentrism" or whatnot, and blame the East's troubles on "colonialism," "imperialism," etc...never on Communism, or local tyrants, or the peasantries only too happy to slaughter Jews and Gypsies. Because, of course, all cultures are equal, and $DEITY forbid anybody pronounce one culture superior to any other!

Inevitably, one such reviewer trots out the old line about how "in 800 A.D., for instance, the Byzantines and Arabs and Chinese were producing great works in art, architecture, and astronomy, while the Europeans were wallowing in feudal primitivism." Well, that's nice, but it's currently 2003 C.E. What have they done lately? We've been hearing that argument about the Islamofascists ad nauseum since September 11th, 2001, and I'm tired of it. What they've done lately is cut out the clitorides of young girls, stone adulteresses, force women into identity-obliterating garments, declare fatwas on "heretics," reprint Nazi literature, blow themselves up in pizzerias full of teenagers, and fly airplanes into skyscrapers.

While one Balkan titled his review, "This book is no longer accurate," I think it's actually become a hell of a lot more relevant to world politics since 9/11. What's past is always prologue, as our 21st-century enemies with their seventh-century mindsets dismayingly prove.

Back in "sophisticated" Europe, the age-old hobby of antisemitic violence has been re-discovered with a passion. While this has been most in evidence in the West (for example, the thugs who seized a young Jewish woman in Paris and carved a Star of David into the flesh of her wrist), I didn't miss this comment from a Romanian reviewer: "[Kaplan's] book is biased because he is Jewish, so he portrays the Jews as great saints while the Romanians are tyrants and unworthy of anyone's attention." The implication, of course, is that Jews victimized Romanians as much as vice versa. Would someone please send me a link to a story in which Jews dragged Romanians to slaughterhouses and strong-armed them onto conveyor belts that ended in sharp blades?

Kaplan may indeed be biased, and I'm giving the book four stars on the presumption that the reviewers pointing out simple factual errors, such as those of spelling and etymology, are correct. But other writers validate much of what Kaplan writes -- such as Andrei Codrescu, of that oh-so-right-wing media outlet NPR, who is a Romanian Jew. There's also a highly engaging P.J. O'Rourke article on Albania in which the tribalism comes off even worse than it does in Kaplan's book.