The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War

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Retail On a summer morning in Sarajevo almost a hundred years ago, a teenager took a pistol out of his pocket and fired not just the opening rounds of the First World War but the starting gun for modern history. By killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Gavrilo Princip, started a cycle of events that would leave 15 million dead from fighting between 1914 and 1918 and proved fatal for empires and a way of ruling that had held for centuries. The Trigger tells the story of a young man who changed the world forever. It focuses on the drama of the incident itself by following Prinip’s journey. By retracing his steps from the feudal frontier village of his birth, through the mountains of the northern Balkans to the great plain city of Belgrade and ultimately Sarajevo, Tim Butcher illuminates our understanding of Princip— the person and the place that shaped him—and makes discoveries about him that have eluded historians for a hundred years. Traveling through the Balkans on Princip’s trail, and drawing on his own experiences there as a war reporter during the 1990s, Butcher unravels this complex part of the world and its conflicts, and shows how the events that were sparked that day in June 1914 still have influence today. Published for the centenary of the assassination, The Trigger is a rich and timely work, part travelogue, part reportage, and part history. ** From Booklist Starred Review In a uniquely effective counterpart to Margaret MacMillan’s fine account of the run-up to WWI (The War That Ended Peace, 2013), author Butcher, who covered the 1990s Balkans conflict for the Daily Telegraph, returns to Bosnia and Herzegovina to literally retrace the steps of young Gavrilo Princip, who at age 19 assassinated the heir-apparent to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a killing that triggered the Great War 100 years ago. Butcher, whose maternal grandmother’s older brother died in that appallingly tragic conflict, follows Princip’s path from his tiny, near-destitute mountain village of Obljaj to Sarajevo, where he found a cohort of young firebrands like himself, bridling under the harsh economic and political conditions imposed on Bosnians by the empire. Along the way, Butcher renders the countryside and cityscapes—and the people who inhabit them—in fine detail, while also moving back and forth in time, taking in the Ottoman rule, the political climate of the early 1900s, the recent Bosnian war, and the landscape as it looks today. Top-notch reporting by a journalist who knows the lay of the land, as he also keeps a healthy remove from an ethnic conflict that, like a dormant volcano, still seethes. --Alan Moores Review "Riveting." — New York Times “Butcher, who covered the 1990s Balkans conflict for the Daily Telegraph , returns to Bosnia and Herzegovina to literally retrace the steps of young Gavrilo Princip. . . . Along the way, Butcher renders the countryside and cityscapes—and the people who inhabit them—in fine detail, while also moving back and forth in time, taking in the Ottoman rule, the political climate of the early 1900s, the recent Bosnian war, and the landscape as it looks today. Top-notch reporting by a journalist who knows the lay of the land.” — Booklist (starred review) “Engrossing. . . . A fascinating history of a complex region rife with ethnic rivalries and a vivid travelogue of a dangerous journey across a landscape marked by the minefields and devastation of the fighting of the 1990s. . . . A haunting and illuminating book.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A significant contribution to the growing body of literature on the outbreak of WWI. . . . In the 1990s, Butcher covered Yugoslavia’s collapse into mutual genocide, and his evocative interfacing of his experiences with Princip’s is a highlight of the book.” — Publishers Weekly “No one has got closer into the mind of one of the key figures of the last century, Gavrilo Princip, than the journ