The murderous war in Yugoslavia confounds the Western democracies and focuses the world's attention on the Serbs as children of darkness. "A valiant and warlike race," Churchill called the Serbs. Certainly their reputation for war has stuck. But for much of the world the Serbs are a mystery and a menace.

Florence Levinsohn's Belgrade seriously and persuasively questions this reputation as well as the perception of Serbian guilt in the Balkan conflict. This stunning and clear-headed investigation by an accomplished independent journalist goes further than any other in explaining the war in Yugoslavia. Belgrade is also a vivid portrait of one of Europe's most intriguing cities - which since 1992 has been enduring a draconian United Nations embargo.

Through a series of engrossing conversations with Serbian intellectuals in Belgrade, Serbia's capital, Ms. Levinsohn explores the causes of the war, the motives of its leading spirits, and the role of the Serbs as villains. She unpeels the many layers of confusion, despair, cynicism, anger, and yearning felt by Serbs living under a government they neither understand nor endorse, but feel hopeless to unseat.

In an absorbing analysis of the Serbian national character, she finds a proud people involved in a war for which they have no sympathy and only long for an end. And she shows convincingly how the roots of the war lie in political exploitation of ethnic and religious hatreds.

1. Cutting through myth and misinformation, Ms. Levinsohn finds enough guilt in the Yugoslav war to satisfy Serbs, Croatians, and Muslims alike - and a great measure of misdirected policy in the West. Her great achievement is to explain a puzzling people involved in the most brutal conflict to come out of the end of the cold war.