April 7, 2014
Journalist Butcher (Blood River) makes a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on the outbreak of WWI by retracing the physical, mental, and emotional road to Sarajevo for Gavrilo Princip, the Yugoslav nationalist who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Beginning in Princip’s native village, Butcher backpacks and hitchhikes through the still-conflicted lands of Bosnia and Serbia, following the path of a “bibliophile teenager with a highlander’s pedigree and a feeling for the underdog.” What began as a quest for education led Princip ever further to radical nationalism: a vision of “freeing all south Slavs.” Butcher’s vivid sense of place shows—sometimes against his intention—how geography, history, even architecture, both unite and divide Balkan Slavs as they share a “common historical narrative of suffering.” But without an external target like the Ottoman or Habsburg empires, they turn against each other. As a young war correspondent in the 1990s, Butcher covered Yugoslavia’s collapse into mutual genocide, and his evocative interfacing of his experiences with Princip’s is a highlight of the book. Butcher’s “witnessing a war voyeuristically” left him with “a persistent sense of shame” that becomes a counterpoint to the ruination of Princip’s dream—a dream Princip himself unwittingly relegated to futility with two pistol shots.
Starred review from May 1, 2014
In a uniquely effective counterpart to Margaret MacMillan's fine account of the run-up to WWI (The War That Ended Peace, 2013), author Butcher, who covered the 1990s Balkans conflict for the Daily Telegraph, returns to Bosnia and Herzegovina to literally retrace the steps of young Gavrilo Princip, who at age 19 assassinated the heir-apparent to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a killing that triggered the Great War 100 years ago. Butcher, whose maternal grandmother's older brother died in that appallingly tragic conflict, follows Princip's path from his tiny, near-destitute mountain village of Obljaj to Sarajevo, where he found a cohort of young firebrands like himself, bridling under the harsh economic and political conditions imposed on Bosnians by the empire. Along the way, Butcher renders the countryside and cityscapesand the people who inhabit themin fine detail, while also moving back and forth in time, taking in the Ottoman rule, the political climate of the early 1900s, the recent Bosnian war, and the landscape as it looks today. Top-notch reporting by a journalist who knows the lay of the land, as he also keeps a healthy remove from an ethnic conflict that, like a dormant volcano, still seethes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)
April 15, 2014
Butcher's ("Daily Telegraph") perspective on the "trigger" of the Great War, a Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip (1894-1918), forms a work that is a combination history, psychological profile, and memoir. Inspired by his time covering the Bosnian War in the 1990s, the author follows Princip's path from Herzegovina to Serbia and from student to assassin, to learn of his motivations that ultimately changed the course of world events. What makes this work particularly engaging is the juxtaposition of Butcher's war experience with his current journey. The author's curiosity as to how Princip fits into the region's history is contagious; he carries the reader along on his quest, using primary sources such as archives and oral histories to paint a fuller picture than other recent works such as Sean McMeekin's "July 1914". VERDICT Recommended for those interested in the causes of World War I and in the Slavic region.--Maria Bagshaw, Elgin Community Coll. Lib., IL
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from May 15, 2014
The engrossing story of Gavrilo Princip (1894-1918), the 19-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on June 28, 1914, sparked World War I.While covering the Bosnian War of the 1990s, former Daily Telegraph correspondent Butcher (Chasing the Devil: A Journey Through Sub-Saharan Africa in the Footsteps of Graham Greene, 2011, etc.) became intrigued by Princip after visiting a littered Sarajevo chapel that commemorated the assassin's name. In 2012, he returned to the Balkans to follow the path of the young peasant's life from his home in the remote hamlet of Obljaj (where Princip left his initials on a rock and declared, "One day people will know my name,") to Sarajevo, where he became a student and "slow-burn revolutionary" determined to overthrow the Austro-Hungarian occupiers of his homeland. Butcher details the assassination (Princip's first shot cut the Archduke's jugular vein; the second killed his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg), the ensuing trial and the assassin's death in prison from tuberculosis. The author's intelligent, near-obsessive, textured account of the assassin's life and times is a fascinating history of a complex region rife with ethnic rivalries and a vivid travelogue of a dangerous journey across a landscape marked by the minefields and devastation of the fighting of the 1990s. More broadly, Butcher makes clear the importance of Princip's act as the spark that detonated an "explosive mix of old-world superiority, diplomatic miscalculation, strategic paranoia and hubristic military overconfidence." Deliberately misrepresenting the assassin's motives (which were to liberate not only Serbia, but all south Slavs), Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia, which led to World War I. Butcher notes that under different regimes, Princip has been remembered variously as a hero and a terrorist. The author views him as "an everyman for the anger felt by millions who were downtrodden far beyond the Balkans."A haunting and illuminating book marking the centennial of the assassination.
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