Like other books I've read and enjoyed by Tim Butcher, The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War includes a long and arduous walk through difficult - and literally mined - territory interwoven with both recent and long-ago history. In this case, it's the former Yugoslavia through which Butcher hikes, particularly Bosnia and Serbia, while seeking to make sense of both Gavrilo Princip's actions leading up to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the more recent Balkans War of the 1990s, which Butcher covered as a foreign correspondent.
As always, Butcher's writing is bright and chipper, even when his subject is dark and heavy. Case in point: "Princip may have sparked a century of turmoil, but he started out as a quiet and exemplary student from the provinces." And on and on (and I mean that in only the best way) through the century as Butcher reconstructs that ancient hostilities and the new ones, the festering sores poked and prodded by the Ottomans and then the Austrians, the long shadow of colonialism and enforced poverty.
Trigger is an excellent read, and should be compulsory for anyone wanting to understand the origins of the origins of the origins of World War I, as well as the lingering resentments in the region.
Five stars.
