[2] His brother's untimely death – the subject of the book One Crowded Hour: The Saga of An American Boy by Jenane (Patterson) Binder[3][4] — was the source of considerable despair for his family and eventually led to his enrollment at a distant boarding school in Pennsylvania at the age of 13.

Binder started his journalist career as a reporter and an editor for Carbondale Free Press-Southern-Illinoisan (1951), Louisville Times (1954–1956), Institute of Current World Affairs in Germany (1957–1959), Daily Mail in London (1959–1960) and Minneapolis Tribune (1960–1961).

Binder was a journalist for The New York Times from 1961 to 2004,[10] reporting on topics regarding Eastern and Western Europe, the Soviet Union, the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico.

Binder served on numerous occasions as a special correspondent for The New York Times, including reporting on the decline of the Soviet Bloc in 1987, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Communist regimes in the German Democratic Republic,[12] Romania, Albania and Yugoslavia in 1990–1992.

In the 1990s, he traveled extensively in the Balkans to report on the wars that broke out in the aftermath of the dissolution of Yugoslavia (1990–1995) and the post-Communist regimes in Bulgaria and Romania.

"[16] After his retirement from The New York Times, Binder continued to contribute to the newspaper with his researched and detailed obituaries of political or cultural figures including Egon Bahr, John Keegan, Rauf Denktash, Christa Wolf, Judith Coplon, Werner Eberlein, Spike Milligan, Hildegard Knef, Stefan Heym, Budd Boetticher and Ruth Werner.

[17] Binder was one of the contributors to The New York Times obituary of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a National Security Adviser for the Jimmy Carter administration, who died on May 26, 2017.

[27] In its first issue, he published an article entitled "The End of the Bloc", stating that the Soviet Union's Eastern European empire was "falling apart before our eyes".

Fare Well, Illyria sums up the author's thorough knowledge of the political and cultural history of the Balkans as well as his personal experience gained over four decades covering the region.