Some can't hear the name Robert Kaplan without blaming him for the delay in U.S. intervention in the Bosnian war. A journalist could only dream of having so much influence. And yet, without his even knowing it at the time (he was in Turkey and Azerbaijan then), Kaplan's third -- and what has become his most controversial -- book, "Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History," made its way onto the bedside table of a new U.S. president, Bill Clinton, and was reported to have played a role in spooking him from putting troops in Bosnia.

No one is more surprised than Kaplan at his book's influence. "When I was writing and finishing 'Balkan Ghosts' and having it copy edited, my life experience was this: I had two previously published books, on Ethiopia and Afghanistan, which were reviewed well, and sank without a trace," he told me. "When I was reporting 'Balkan Ghosts' in the 1980s," he added, "the Balkans were like Ethiopia, an obscure country. The idea that any policymaker would read it, I didn't even consider. I saw it purely as an entertaining journalistic travel book about my experiences in the 1980s."

A dark, hypnotic, at times lyrical account of Kaplan's travels through the Balkans in the late 1980s and early '90s, "Balkan Ghosts" puts the ethnic conflicts that tore up Yugoslavia in the '90s in the context of a fault line in civilization that Kaplan locates along the borders of the ancient Holy Roman and Eastern Byzantine empires, later a divide between Christian Europe and Muslim Ottoman Turkey's holdings in the Balkans. Kaplan's portrayal of a Serbian Orthodox nun vowing a holy war against "Muslim" Albanians, of Serbian police beating Kosovar Albanians after a soccer match in November 1989, suggest a tinderbox, a place riven by such innate, historical and profound ethnic and religious hatreds, that a brutal war and ethnic cleansing seem almost inevitable.

"Here [in the Balkans] men have been isolated by poverty and ethnic rivalry, dooming them to hate," Kaplan writes of his search for history, as he travels south from prosperous European Austria to disintegrating prewar Yugoslavia. "Here politics has been reduced to a level of near anarchy. What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities? Is there a bad smell, a genius loci, something about the landscape that might incriminate?"

Many who advocated intervention to stop the slaughter in Bosnia, and many Yugoslavs as well, bitterly criticized Kaplan for focusing on the "ancient hatreds" clichis while downplaying the high rate of intermarriage, cosmopolitanism, areligiousness and peaceful coexistence that characterized Sarajevo, Bosnia and much of Yugoslavia during the Tito era. In fact, Bosnia is mostly absent from "Balkan Ghost," which was almost entirely reported in the years before the war there.

At the time he was reporting, what mattered to Kaplan was to depict the intensity of the stifled hatreds and historical grievances in the region, to convey to readers the power that "ghosts" seemed to have on the psyche of some of the population in the waning days of Communism. He didn't intend to be comprehensive. In a way, "Balkan Ghosts" is an alarm bell: Hey, all of you cheering the peaceful end of the Cold War. This place is about to blow.

Of course, by the time "Balkan Ghosts" was published, one year into the Bosnian slaughter, the details mattered. It mattered that members of a cosmopolitan civilization that lived and breathed and supported multiethnicity -- a population largely ignored in the book -- were being forced from their homes and murdered by those fighting for fascist, ethnically "pure" states carved out through genocide. And the fact that those decent, civilized people were mostly absent from Kaplan's portrait of the Balkans outraged those who couldn't stand to watch them being slaughtered by thugs.

Kaplan says, "If I knew what would happen, I would have been clearer in bringing out those points," Kaplan says. "I did add a more blunt preface to later editions, that says this is only a travel book."

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