Adtiatic by Robert Kaplan

I really enjoyed this book, so much so that I would seek out books he has written in the past. The subtitle is: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age and it is part travelogue and memoir, with a sprinkling of geopolitical perspective, and while if you are a purist you might find it annoying, for me the travelogue sucked me in and the geopolitical importance aspect made me think. The author's approach in this book is to travel to a key city or town of the region and read about its history and culture with books that he has brought with him on his travels. Sometimes he meets up with political and cultural leaders. He frequently compares and contrasts a city’s or town’s appearance today with what he saw decades ago. The journey begins in Rimini, Ravenna, Venice, and Trieste on the Italian shore of the Adriatic; thence to Piran, Koper, and Ljubljana in Slovenia; Rijeka, Zagreb, Split, Korcula, and Dubrovnik in Croatia; Kotor and Podgorica in Montenegro; Durres and Tirana in Albania; and finally to Corfu in Greece. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and his blatant disregard for world order, this book both enlightened me and frightened me a bit.