As a journalist for the BBC, Fox, who now writes for the London Daily Telegraph , criss-crossed the Mediterranean between 1984 and 1991, from Marrakesh in southern Morocco to Syria and Israel. His brilliant mosaic of reportage, travelogue and history offers both a marvelous adventure and a penetrating look at a region beset by population explosion, tribal wars, cultural conflict and the rise of crime syndicates, clan organizations and extremist religious groups. Fox's prose is precise and arresting: in Greece, "the most conspicuous inanimate victim" of pollution, he observes, "is the Parthenon, bandaged in scaffolding against the mordant smog." He finds the past embedded in the present in French Provence, experiences culture shock in Egypt's Nile valley, analyzes Turkey's transformation into "regional strong man" and gauges Catalonia's cultural revival. In a concluding update, Fox discusses "the Yugoslav vendetta," political corruption in Italy, Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq and the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Algeria.

In Fox's animated and perceptive chronicles, we discover a world in fermentation, stirred by irresistible forces of change: the growth of populations in the south (owing to overwhelming waves of migration from North Africa), the ever-mounting pressures on a perilously fragile ecosystem, the revival of ancient religions in more fanatical form. Perhaps most alarming are the political changes. The Mediterranean has always been a varied human mosaic in which ties of tribe and custom have been more meaningful than national boundaries. But as Fox persuasively shows, the new order now emerging after the end of the Cold War calls into question the very survival of the traditional nation-state - most notably in Yugoslavia, where long-suppressed ethnic rivalries have been unleashed, leading to full-blown war, and in Italy, where regional differences and the ever more powerful grip of organized crime threaten the dissolution of that nation.