SOURCE: “Short Book, Long Apology,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 12, 1997, p. 12.

In the following review, Rieff offers a negative evaluation of A Journey to the Rivers, which he calls a “contemptible book.”

For all the divisions that became apparent between their nations once the former Yugoslavia descended into war in 1991, Western European and North American intellectuals were remarkably united in their responses to the catastrophe. In this way, as in so many others, the Croatian and Bosnian wars seem to have recapitulated the experience of the Spanish Civil War more than half a century earlier.

Then as now, the stances of the major outside powers were either frankly to side with the rebels (Franco’s Fascists in 1936; the Bosnian Serbs in 1992) or to remain formally neutral but interpreting that neutrality to mean that the government side (the Spanish Republicans; the authorities in Sarajevo) was to be...