The Trigger

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.)