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

Butcher, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0701187948 ISBN 13: 9780701187941

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2014

Synopsis

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, Butler 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.

About this title

About the Author

Tim Butcher is a bestselling author and explorer whose books blend history with travel. His first book, Blood River, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and his second, Chasing the Devil, was longlisted for the Orwell Prize. Tim is a former foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. He lives in Cape Town with his family.

Gerard Doyle records everything from adult, young adult, and children's books to literary fiction, mysteries, humor, adventure, and fantasy. He has won countless AudioFile Earphones Awards and was named a Best Voice in Young Adult Fiction in 2008.

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0701187948
• ISBN 13: 9780701187941
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352