In Europe, where it has been seen as pro-Serbian, journalist Peter Handke's meditative essay on ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia has been stirring up a great deal of controversy. But Handke, a German and a longtime resident of Paris, disavows nationalist partisanship. Instead, he works to unravel the tangles of ethnic hatred, snarled over generations and centuries, to discover whether peace is possible in the Balkans, and he reserves his enmity for the European media, which, he maintains, has systematically misunderstood the collapse of the former communist world. This book is impressionistic and short--you can read it over coffee in about an hour--but also deeply thoughtful, and deeply unsettling.