Correspondents who covered the war, the authors are particularly strong on the rise of Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian nationalist movement, whose arc of destruction began in Kosovo in the late 1980's and has now returned there. The central event of the Bosnian war was the genocidal Serb rampage against Muslim civilians between April and September 1992. As journalists in Bosnia, Mr. Vulliamy and Mr. Gutman played central roles in revealing the existence of Serb concentration camps to the world while Western governments chose to look the other way. Sarajevo, a place where faiths and cultures once mingled, was a chief focus and a symbol of the fighting. Here, before the barbarians arrived, the way that Yugoslavia bridged east and west, Christianity and Islam, was evident in the city's mottled beauty.
History is present in the Balkans with extraordinary immediacy.
But fiction may, in the end, provide deeper clues to the region's shifting tides. The novels of Ivo Andric, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, capture the light and dark of Bosnia.