A vivid, contemporary travelogue, Salonica Terminus explores a current landscape thronged with figures bent beneath the weight of history. It peers beneath the rotting logs of ideology, and prods the decomposing hulks of historical corpses that litter this region of dark mountains and misty valleys. Through its pages lurch extremists, confidence men and would-be national saviors in the vivid, disarticulated manner of shadow puppets. Injustice and blood, it suggests, breed revenge and further injustice in a land where memories are long and knives are sharp.

From Bosnian actuality to Macedonian potentiality, Fred A. Reed’s recent travels in this region lead him to encounter a landscape inscribed with a shocking testimony: ethno-racialist aspirations remain the only coin in which peoples feel they can express their belonging, their social solidarity—the only credible alternative to the blight of free-market globalism.