I had better explain. Earlier this month I picked up a battered Penguin paperback of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon at the fall book sale of the Georgetown public library. I had wanted to read West’s massive travelogue for years, and so when I came home I threw myself into an armchair and began immediately. I am hardly the first to say this, but the book is engrossing. West is a master of excursus, the difficult art of lifting off out of the narrative into a higher plane of historical digression, philosophical speculation, and literary criticism before lightly touching back down into the story. Her style is well suited to her material, the disjointed nation of Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II. West makes a compelling case that the fate of modern Europe was decided in the Balkans.