Traces the journey of Greek-American director across the Balkans in search of several lost reels of film short by the Manakia brothers, pioneers of cinema in that region of the world. Along the way he has several passionate encounters with various women who have been, or may have been, part of his life.

A war with Albanian gangs is deadly ground. A war with the U.S. Senate is suicide. But innocents are caught in the middle and Michael Harmon also known as Ghost never believed in fighting fair.-from back cover.

"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...

"The Austro-Hungarian army that marched east and south to confront the Russians and Serbs in the opening campaigns of World War I had a glorious past but a pitiful present. Speaking a mystifying array of languages and lugging outdated weapons, the Austrian troops were hopelessly unprepared for the industrialized warfare that would shortly consume Europe. As prizewinning historian Geoffrey Wawro explains in A Mad Catastrophe, the doomed Austrian conscripts...