Tim Butcher

“The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War”
by Tim Butcher

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
-Print: COPYRIGHT ©: 3 Jun 2014; ISBN: 978-0-8021-2325-1; PUBLISHER: Grove Press; PAGES: 352 pages; UNABRIDGED (Hardcover Info from Grove Atlantic https://groveatlantic.com/book/the-trigger/ ) [I didn’t see inside the printed version, so can only assume that it, like the digital version, has photographs, notes, bibliography, links, and index.]
-Digital: COPYRIGHT ©: 2 Jun 2014; eISBN 9780802191885; PUBLISHER: Grove Press; PAGES: 327 pages; ILLUSTRATED: Photographs; INCLUDES: Notes, Bibliography, Links, Index; UNABRIDGED (Digital Info from Libby app and downloaded eBoook)

-*Audio: COPYRIGHT ©: 12 Jun 2014; ISBN: Not found; PUBLISHER: Tantor Media, Inc.; DURATION: 10 hours; Unabridged; (Audiobook Info from Tantor.com https://tantor.com/the-trigger-tim-butcher.html )

-Feature Film or tv: No.

SERIES: No

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED: I can’t recall how I ran into this one, but the cover told me it would be about the assassin of Franz Ferdinand, and I did want to know more about the incident and it’s consequences.

-ABOUT: “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 Prin[c]ip’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.�� –From Grove Atlantic Publishers.

-OVERALL OPINION: This author was a journalist, covering the Balkans for the "Daily Telegraph" in the 1990’s. I always trust journalists from prominent publications to write something interesting and write it well. I was not disappointed.
I loved the first-person memoir approach of Tim’s journey, first with a talented translator (Arnie Hecimovic, whom Tim knew and trusted from his Bosnian war years of the '90’s, who’d learned English through the lyrics of such bands as The Clash) and then, hiking on his own. He traces the route (always dangerous with its share of wild animals such as bears and multiple clashing ethnicities and religious groups, and then made more so since the 90’s by the planting of numerous landmines) that the Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, made from his homeland of Obljaj to Sarajevo, where he planned to free Bosnia from foreign rule by shooting Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg Empire, during Franz’s announced visit to Sarajevo.
Tim also visited Balkan towns and cities where Gavrilo worked and studied.
The book was quite informative and fascinating, and left me all the more curious as to everything involved in the domino effect of the consequences.

AUTHOR:
Tim Butcher:
“Tim Butcher worked for the Daily Telegraph from 1990 to 2009 as chief war correspondent, Africa bureau chief, and Middle East correspondent. His first book, Blood River, was a number-one bestseller in the UK and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He lives in Cape Town. “ __From Grove Atlantic.

“Tim Butcher (born 15 November 1967) is an English author, broadcaster and journalist. He is the author of Blood River (2007), Chasing the Devil (2010) and The Trigger (2014), travel books blending contemporary adventure with history.” __Excerpt from Wikipedia

NARRATOR:
Gerard Doyle
“"Narrator Gerard Doyle performs this work as if he has an intimate knowledge of its content, leaving little doubt that he and the author are of like mind." ---AudioFile

“Gerard Doyle is an English actor and audiobook narrator. He has won 1 Audie Award and 35 Earphone Awards. AudioFile named him a Golden Voice Narrator.[1]
Doyle was born to Irish parents and was born and raised in England.[2]
He presently lives with his wife and two children in Sag Harbor, New York.[2]
Aside from narrating audiobooks, Doyle teaches theatre at a private school.[3] “ __From Wikipedia

**ME: I found Gerard to be an excellent narrator.

GENRE:
Nonfiction; Biography; Autobiography; History

TIME FRAME:
20th Century

SUBJECTS: (not comprehensive)
Austria; Hungary; Military; 20th Century U.S. History; World War I; German History; Eastern Europe; General Europe; Austria & Hungary; Travel; Contemporary; Wars and Conflicts; Balkan States – History; Politics; Gavrilo Princip

DEDICATION:
"For my greatest shapers Stanley and Lisette"

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
Excerpt from Chapter 1: “Fresh Flotsam”
“In other wars more people have died, more nations been involved and the world brought closer to annihilation, but somehow the First World War retains a dread aura all of its own. The guns fell silent all those years ago, but like a refrain that stays with the audience long after the music stops, the First World War has a returning power. So monumental was the suffering, so far-reaching the influence on history that the war still generates reward not just for writers, academics and artists, but for people simply learning about themselves, their bloodlines, their place. The Great War’s power lies with the suspicion that its impact has yet to be fully understood.
I was born in Britain half a century after the fighting ended, yet the First World War has always been thereabouts, a background presence shaping me and my setting, a founding sequence in my make-up. Often it was so faint it was difficult to discern: the whittling of one’s own self through the loss of a distant ancestor. Occasionally it spiked: in my teens sitting with my mother as she wept through the Festival of Remembrance televised each year from the Royal Albert Hall in London. But a war from a hundred years ago remains relevant enough to intrude on our todays through a sense that closure has perhaps yet to be reached. The moral clarity that framed the Second World War’s struggle against Nazi totalitarianism, or the Cold War’s friction between right and left, seems to evade the earlier conflict. The question, ‘Was it right to go to war in 1914?’ can be answered in many ways, through bullet points or lengthy treatises, but I wonder if any answer is totally convincing. This is what keeps the First World War so charged – the unease born of doubt as to whether the sacrifice was worthwhile. For me, this is what transforms so powerfully the words of Laurence Binyon, plain enough by themselves, but, when delivered on a raw November morning to a gathering of people wearing red paper poppies, they ache from what might have been: *We Will Remember Them*.
In the small Northamptonshire village where I grew up, the First World War was remembered in glass. Hellidon was too small to have shops, so the community revolved, as it had for centuries, around the church of St John the Baptist, a modest but stolid place of worship in keeping with the village’s position at the middle of Middle England. Built of locally quarried ironstone, St John’s was chilly-damp in winter, yet on summer nights the butterscotch masonry bled warmth from the day’s baking in the sun. It was old enough to have known fighting; indeed, my childish imagination was fired by stories about the runnels that flute the stone arch in the portico. I was told they had been left by seventeenth-century noblemen sharpening their swords before battle in the Civil War.
As children, my friends and I would dare each other to climb the bell-tower, and for years I earned pocket money mowing the grass in the graveyard. At the village carol service one year I fought my first trembling battle with stage fright when I was called on to read the Advent message from the Archangel Gabriel. A box had to be placed in the pulpit so that I could see out as I wrestled with nerves and difficult words. The next generation of Butchers would themselves pass through St John’s, with my firstborn niece being baptised there, while my own son would take snot-nosed delight in toddling up the lane to watch the bell-ringers at practice.
And each of these modest moments of a family’s making were watched over by four figures immortalised in a stained-glass window that was set to catch the southern sun Such windows are where biblical characters tend to be represented, but in the Hellidon village church a group of decidedly unbiblical-looking male faces have stared out since their unveiling in 1920. Against a setting of rich green foliage and red petals, daylight can give the figures an authentically holy glow. They wear the pure-silver armour of chivalrous medieval knights; indeed, one is helmeted, but the other three have the pasted-down, centre-parted hairstyles of early twentieth-century England. They are portraits of the menfolk of the village who gave their lives in the First World War: two brothers, William and James Hedges, Fred Wells and John Buchanan.
It was this window that first brought me to think about the war, although my early grasp was childlike. Mostly I was interested in the sword that the helmeted figure leans on and in the stirringly heroic words of the memorial’s swirling epitaph: ‘The Noble Army of Martyrs Praise Thee.’ These were men from my village, from my side. They died for us in a foreign place, in a cause that simply must have been noble. Now, back to the sword.”

RATING:.
4

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
5/4/24 to 5/21/24… (more)

I read this book because I really liked the authors previous book, Blood River. Mr Butcher, is a much stronger and more adventurous person than I am. After the hell he endured chronicling the story for Blood River, he decided to double down and travel by foot the same path Graham Greene did in "Journey Without Maps"- from 1935. This book takes place in 2009, and in many ways the countries visited in the book: Sierra Leone, Liberia and a couple of days in Guinea, have not changed in nearly 75 years. Except to become worse. These are countries that have not had any real level of stability for the last 40 years, having been run by extremely corrupt governments who were brutally violent, against their perceived enemies, and who buried their countries with horrible pointless wars. Add to this the fact that this area of the world exposes people to yellow fever, Lassa, Ebola, Malaria, and lord knows what other pathogens, that the people in the West only read about, and yet the author thought walking on barely defined jungle trails would be a worthy adventure to write about. Thank god there are people like Tim Butcher, who can expose to the reader, countries like these, while also giving history and insight into why these countries are the way they are, and how sadly much of the projects and work of the UN and NGO's makes little or no difference. (My opinion, not necessarily the authors). I would love to meet this author and find out more than he divulged in the book as to why he would undertake such a difficult endeavor, as this that he wrote about in Chasing The Devil.… (more)

I have always wanted to travel down the Congo River, from deep in the Congo to the Atlantic coast. But never dared doing so, through a country completely bankrupt and lawless. Tim Butcher did, in 2004, and wrote a fascinating book about it, “Blood River” (2006). Maybe he really wanted to travel the route the explorer Henry Morton Stanley took, in 1877, when he became the first Westerner to travel from the east to the west coast of the continent, and especially, discovered the Congo River, hitherto unknown to Western map makers. Or maybe he wanted to see where his mother travelled in colonial luxury in the 1950. But I think he just had the same obsession as I had, go down that river.
He quickly establishes that his is not adventure travel, no, he calls it ordeal travel. Every part is a major challenge, firstly organising transport in a country where there is none, and then actually moving from one to the next place. The first part is a gruelling couple of days on the back of a motor bike, but he also travels by UN patrol boat, by canoe, by another UN chartered barge. None of the travel is fun, but at least on the road, or the river, he feels slightly safer than in the towns. What he encounters on the way is a country totally lawless, ruled by local strongmen and gangs, vaguely linked to political entities but mostly after their own, immediate and uncontrolled interest, in the process terrorising everybody else. And what he describes is a country going backwards, from a relatively well developed infrastructure under Belgian colonial rule to a place not unlike the one encountered by Stanley: the roads have disappeared again, have been reduced to narrow tracks; the only remnant of the railway is an overgrown sleeper; rusty metal hulls are all that is left of ships that used to sail up and down the river frequently. In the jungle there is nothing that reminds one of what we would consider normal life. One of his most poignant observations is that the older generations have, in fact, been exposed to more modernity that the younger ones – the inverse of what is considered normal in the rest of the world.
Throughout his journey Mr Butcher lives in constant fear. And you wonder what for, in the end. You know, apart from the occasional character he finds – a Belgian priest who arrived in the 1940s, or a British spinster, who has spent her entire life in the Congo, or some extremely helpful aid workers, both expatriate and local – apart from those people, there is really nothing to see, apart from green jungle and muddy river, and the occasional dilapidated town. That he manages to reach the Atlantic coast, alive and in less than two months, is a major achievement, for which I have the utmost respect, never mind that during reading the book I often referred to Mr Butcher as the lunatic. The other thing he achieved is that I don’t need to make that trip anymore, myself.… (more)