Regardless of the controversy it generated, "Balkan Ghosts" is incredibly absorbing. The chapter on Romania is particularly brilliant and evocative, recounting Bucharest life through the history of the once-glorious and now diminished Athenee Palace hotel. Kaplan's portraits of the people he meets capture the destroyed dreams of many who lived under the Ceausescu regime:

His name was Stefan Stirbu, a 51-year-old artist who had an exhibition in 1974 in Memphis, and another in 1977 in Pittsburgh. After 1977, Stirbu was not allowed to leave the country. He slowly became a prisoner in this small room in Tulcea with its soot-blackened windows. He looked at the review clips every day, to remind himself that a world still existed outside and that he had twice been there."

"Balkan Ghosts" also offers some breathtakingly prescient insights into the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. And Kaplan suggests intriguing parallels between Ottoman despotism and Soviet totalitarianism, and that the decline of the Ottoman Empire, its shards spread throughout the Balkans, offers clues to how the Soviet empire's demise might play out.

With almost eerie accuracy, Kaplan seems to chronicle the future. In 1985, he interviewed the former high-level aide to Marshall Tito and Stalin confidant Milovan Djilas, who predicted the disintegration of both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union years before it occurred. Spurred by a later conversation with Djilas in 1989, Kaplan writes in "Balkan Ghosts":

A thought then occurred to me: if Yugoslavia was the laboratory of Communism, then Communism would breathe its last dying breath here in Belgrade. And to judge by what [Slobodan] Milosevic was turning into by early 1989, Communism would exit the world stage revealed for what it truly was: fascism, without fascism's ability to make the trains run on time.

Eleven years later, the world has indeed witnessed revolt against the last Communist regime in Eastern Europe, in Belgrade, and become all too familiar with the fascistic nature of the Milosevic regime and its failed Greater Serbia project.

Although Kaplan describes "Balkan Ghosts" as an entertaining journalistic travel book, the role it played in shaping policy seems to have deeply affected him. In reading Kaplan's later books ("The Ends of the Earth," "An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future," "The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War," "Eastward to Tartary"), I was struck with just how much his writing has changed, and how conscious he seems to have become of the effect his words could have on policy. Gone is some of the lyricism, some of the sheer joy in adventure. Newly present is an invisible audience of army officers, intelligence analysts and Foreign Affairs subscribers.

"Now I give periodic lectures to the military and to people in the intelligence community," Kaplan says. "I try to kind of figure out what people will want to grasp in two or three years. And there are so many places around the world which are really in an unstable condition, which nobody writes about much. All this upheaval. I kind of keep my eyes on places. I did a piece on Pakistan. I have this instinct that this could be a place like Yugoslavia.

"We're still living in the post-colonial era, where states were organized by the Berlin Congress in 1883, and other similar ones," Kaplan told me when we spoke. "What we saw in the last decade was only the partial crumbling of it. We saw places with small populations -- Sierra Leona, Tajikistan and others unravel. What I am saying is this: When you put together urbanization, big youth bulges, water shortages, crumbling infrastructure, the post-colonial gridwork of nation states will unravel further and take in big countries. A lot of these countries are artificial: Their borders were foisted on them by colonialists. They have been around for enough decades that they have some validity. Nevertheless, ethnic, regional, global identities, city-state identities, all create a far more nuanced understanding of what people think they are than the old nation-state gridwork.

"Things are coming apart," Kaplan added. "And when this happens where there are weak institutions, no middle class, and where big issues of society are unsettled, such as which ethnic group has control, you have a real breakdown."

Identifying the forces that are likely to fuel future social upheaval and conflicts, and putting volatile regions on the radar before they become headlines, Kaplan serves as a one-man early-warning system. But that largely humanitarian project often clashes with the realpolitik vision of global politics and human behavior Kaplan espouses. His portrayal of phenomena such as dissolving borders, ethnic hate, rising crime, population explosion and conflict often conveys a sense of resignation to the inevitable.

For instance, by portraying the ethnic conflict that erupted in Yugoslavia in the 1990s as an irresistible, almost natural force larger than the individuals who chose to kill and ethnically cleanse, he downplays a sense of individual responsibility. Cumulatively, perhaps unwittingly, the effect is to deprive his narratives of a sense of powerful human agency. His writings offer a vivid understanding of the forces that will lead to the next century's Yugoslavias, while expressing little hope that well-informed policies will be erected to forestall disaster. We are heading toward the apocalypse, and there is no deliverance.

"I would be unfaithful to my experience if I thought we had a general solution to these problems," Kaplan writes in "The Ends of the Earth." "We are not in control. As societies grow more populous and complex, the idea that a global elite like the U.N. can engineer reality from above is just as absurd as the idea that political 'scientists' can reduce any of this to a science. In an age of localized mini-holocausts, decisive action in one sphere will not necessarily help the victims in another. Only in a few cases will an organization like the U.N. make a truly pivotal difference."

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