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The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans | 
| Author: Simon Winchester
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada / Non-Fiction
Category: Book
List Price: CDN$ 15.00
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Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 94033
Media: Paperback
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0060954949
Dewey Decimal Number: 320
EAN: 9780060954949
ASIN: 0060954949
Publication Date: October 5, 2000
Availability: Usually ships within 1 - 2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Direct from Distributor - Light Shelf Wear - Remainder Mark
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From Amazon.com
Simon Winchester, a British newspaper reporter for 30 years and the author of 13 books (including IThe Professor and the Madman/I), has turned his attention to the Balkans, an area he visited years ago on a road trip from Vienna to Istanbul--a journey he retraced in the spring of 1999. IThe Fracture Zone/I describes both of those trips, concentrating on the history and character of the region more than the recent war and its aftermath. Winchester has spent most of his career as a foreign correspondent, but his more recent occupations as historian and a writer for IConde Nast Traveler/I are in evidence here. Winchester's angle on the Balkans is unique and well written: those who have been bewildered at best and bored at worst by the Balkan conflict may find that IThe Fracture Zone/I captures their interest better than hundreds of news accounts of war atrocities. "Why is there, and seemingly always has been, this dire inevitability about the Balkans being so fractious and unsettled a corner of the world?" Winchester wonders aloud. That eternal question continues to plague world statesmen and, though not fully answered here, affords the opportunity for an interesting exploration.
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| Customer Reviews:
 The Crazy Balkans February 9, 2008
Ian Gordon Malcomson (Smithers, Canada)
It is his strong reporter nose for detail that makes Winchester's books worth reading. This one on his tour of the Balkans, during the civil war of the 1990s, is no exception. Looking at the region from at least seven different nationalistic angles - Serbia, Austria, Croatia, Montenegro, Islam, Albania, and Kosovo - Winchester provides some extraordinary insights into why this region continues to be so bedeviled with so much internecine strife after countless generations of history. His travels around the war zones of these various newly independent states - the result of the breakup of the old Yugoslavia - covered not only the daily conflict but attempted to probe the Balkan mind as to its complex pathology. What he found under the temporal surface of hatred, fear, and brutality was an enduring history of bitterness resulting from an accumulative and collective memory of hurts, slights and atrocities. What makes this region so fractured and hard to hold together - except during the Tito regime - is that it is a cauldron of nationalities that frankly don't like each other. When people talk about the unifying power of the Generalissimo, they forget that Tito was a Slavic Serb who ruled ruthlessly and did not brook any nationalistic dissent. Winchester found many Serbs yearning for a return of the good old days when people lived under the facade of peace and good will. Now that the bloom is off the rose, the lack of trust and cooperation is so patently obvious in the way they persecute minority groups within their state. Winchester provides numerous examples of how deep this distrust and hostility goes: genocide, ethnic cleansing, human butchery, destroying property, and ghettoizing. Regardless of what geographical angle one comes at this region from - north, west, south or east - they will invariably meet up with battle lines that have a deep historical context. The ongoing skirmishes of today trace back to the campaigns of centuries ago where princes and suzerains tenaciously and viciously fought to protect their preciously small landholdings from the marauding forces. This is the land where the rule of law continues to be based on patriarchal authority and familial honor. One might say, almost as tribal as Africa. If the reader is looking to blame any particular party for keeping the pot boiling, forget it. There is more than enough blame to go around for all those in positions of religious and political authority. What the author shares with his reader is a snapshot of the Balkans embroiled in the agony of some serious blood-letting that wasn't going to end anytime soon unless the West stepped in and restored a semblance of order to the deepening chaos. The book is both an entertaining and informative read, even though it was written back around the truce in the late 1990s. The tensions are still there. At the end of Winchester's stay in the Balkans, he ends up in Istanbul where he encounters perhaps the biggest irony of this whole tragic conflict. Tucked away in the back streets of this Islamic city are dozens of Balkanite enclaves learning to get along with each other in the interests of commerce. br / br / br / br / br /
 An Enlightening Guide to a Shattered and Benighted Land February 24, 2002
Johann Wolfgang von Moeller (United States)
For a thousand years the Balkan peninsula has been the situs of vast cultural upheavals -- the sensibilities and hatreds of the Slavic peoples pushed and pulled and molded by the East and West, by Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Islam, Communism and Nazism. The result is a tragic legacy of manipulation, of hatred, of violence and of death.pSimon Winchester proves himself the perfect guide to this shattered and tragic realm. He is part History Professor, part Philosopher but always a masterful Storyteller. With this and his previous books (especially "The Professor and the Madman") he proves himself to be one of the most eloquent and gripping narrative writers working today. pSome other thoughts:p1. This book ought to be required reading for every American and a warning about the horrible consequences of hate. One of the greatest tragedies of the Balkan conflict is that, as Winchester puts it, "almost all the people who have been so horribly at odds with one another are all, in essential ethnic terms, the self-same people." And lest Europeans and Americans feel smug in their own situations, let them remember the calamities of Antietam, of The Somme, and of Auschwitz.p2. The smart reader will prepare himself or herself with two things before reading. First, a good map. The history of the Balkans is so utterly complex on many different levels, not the least of which is geographically. Second, a good dictionary. Not since Henry Kissinger have I read an author with his quiver so full of (to me) new and interesting words: e.g. from only the first fifty pages I noted, emollient, osmotically, ordure, gyre, excrescences, orotund, refulgent, meretricious, harquebuses, embrasures, barbicans and ravelins. p3. The editing of this book is horrendously sloppy -- it is an embarrassment to Harper Collins. I have never seen so many typographical errors, missing phrases and other stupid mistakes.p4. This is not Winchester's best work. The early chapters are among his best work, but the narrative loses significant punch beginning in chapter six, which deals with the authors time in Montenegro.
Raconteur on a shelled-out road - Winchester on the Balkans October 2, 2001
vfrickey (off in the mountains somewhere)
It's a pleasure to read reminiscences of masterful writers such as William F. Buckley (his sailing books have won him a well-deserved place of honor in sports writing) and Simon Winchester... and as he has seen Yugoslavia in her salad days, prosperous and peaceful, then returned to catalogue the horrors that followed her dissolution, Winchester is the perfect guide through that terribly unhappy place.pWinchester takes us with him on journeys along the Dalmatian coast (through land that is now divided unequally between Croatia, the Bosnian Serb Republic, and the patchwork government of Bosnia-Hercegovina), through the vainglorious, charming and not yet war-torn land of Montenegro, across the ghastly fields of Kosovo just as the Serbs withdrew before NATO forces, across Macedonia, then through parts of Eastern Europe that have been spared the advantages of Serbian leadership and thus remain peaceful and happy.pAll through his travels, Winchester shows us the people who live in these lands, shares with us his bemusement at the human capacity to live around disaster and his shock and sorrow at our capacity to abandon our humanity when we go a-warring, to save our worst outrages for our close neighbors, and forget that Europe has been Christian for nearly 1800 years or, for that matter, what the word Christian means.pWinchester's command of the history of the area is intimidating and overpowering... he shows us entire worlds that we never suspected even existed... capital cities nestled in remote mountain summits and ruled by dynasties of hereditary bishops, places where there are two Orthodox churches vying for a shrinking pool of believers, customs sublime and gross.pI usually hesitate to award a perfect score to a book, no matter how well-written, because it's all too easy for a fellow author like myself to carp at shortcomings that are all too obvious to me - but Simon Winchester has defeated me. His is a complete book, and for me to criticize it would be sheer effrontery. Buy it, read it, and be delighted.
The Balkans for beginners October 20, 2000
heather tyler (sydney, nsw Australia)
Veteran journalist Simon Winchester retraces his steps through the Balkans 20 years after a brief vacation there, to rediscover a region where the geography is as dizzying as the political and ethnic agendas. His journey from Vienna to Istanbul encompasses the crisis in Kosovo and in a series of astute vignettes, Winchester meets some of the major players and the victims. All around him is a simmering cauldron of hatred which has spilled blood yet again and the issues provoke more questions than can ever be answered. Winchester has questions of his own, but he is unable to answer them in any depth. But then, most Westerners have also had trouble analysing the Balkan history of bloodshed. He is only skimming the surface here and for guidance refers to the great works of Nobel prize winner Ivo Andric, whose book Bridge On The Drina remains a classic text to understanding the background of Balkan turmoil. Unfortunately, Winchester departs Kosovo in June 1999, just after NATO enters the region to restore some semblance of calm. I wish he had remained to write about what happened next. The book fizzles a bit when he goes to Bulgaria. There is now a bewildering plethora of books on recent Balkan upheavals. Winchester's wry observations would serve well as a beginner's guide to one of the most troubled and fascinating places on earth.
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