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The first part of this book was wonderful -- travel writing in which place is woven together with literature, philosophy and history and connections are made that are not always direct or obvious. It was like a reboot of WG Sebold's Rings of Saturn, but along the Adriatic Coast of Italy. Then when Mr. Kaplan crosses out of Italy at Trieste, he announces his intention to approach the second half of the book differently by starting to talk with people and to broaden his solitary musings with the perspectives of others. I thought that the second half was going to be even better than the first. This very smart and well read guy was going to travel down the Adriatic Coast on the Balkan side and interact with other equally smart people, who would provide depth and variation that can only come from connecting to others. Alas, it was not to be. None of the people he speaks with shine through as interesting personalities. Their observations are largely banal. And the second half loses the wonderful tone of quirky smart travel writing to become something more like a Thomas Friedman op ed piece. It's just standard journalism that focuses on a multitude of details of recent history so that much of it is noise. There are lots of trees, but no forest. Mr. Kaplan doesn't suddenly become dumb in the second half; he just loses the unique point of view that makes the first half special. I found myself wishing again and again that he had taken his trip in the reverse direction, starting with minutiae and focus on the kind of day to day journalistic details that were necessarily the basis for his career as a reporter and then moving to the broad perspective of the Italian section, showing us how a career spent on the little things can add up to the emergent point of view of a very smart man who has perceived a bigger picture.