More than once, the author questions the reliability of his own sources, leaving us unsure of just how much of this murky...
In war-torn Serbia, a compulsive petty thief metamorphoses from mob boss to paramilitary warlord to international war criminal.
Until his assassination in early 2000—after The Hague indicted him on 24 counts of war crimes, and the United States offered a $5 million bounty on his head—Zeljko Raznatovic, aka Arkan, was responsible for much of the carnage that swept the former Yugoslavia as it descended into a nightmare of mass murder and ethnic cleansing. Freelance journalist Stewart recounts Arkan’s career from his early days as a bank robber to his recruitment as a hit man by Yugoslavian dictator Josip Tito. Twice sprung from prison thanks to his government connections, he displayed an unchecked appetite for the spoils of crime that was soon matched by his thirst for power. As Yugoslavia unraveled in the 1980s following Tito’s death, Arkan transformed himself from international bank robber and gangster to ultra-nationalist paramilitary leader, forming his own private army manned with unruly young soccer fans, whose anger and frustration he deftly tapped. With the blessing of another Serbian madman, President Slobodan Miloševic, Arkan and his army of “Serbian patriots” pillaged their way through Croatia, then Bosnia and finally Kosovo, leaving thousands dead in their wake. In the process, he amassed millions in spoils, married the country’s top pop singer in an opulent wedding rivaling that of Prince Charles and Diana, and even won a seat in Parliament. Stewart diligently follows his dark, bloody trail, but doesn’t quite manage to bring this sinister madman out of the shadows. Readers never get a feel for the source of Arkan’s hatred and ruthlessness.
More than once, the author questions the reliability of his own sources, leaving us unsure of just how much of this murky story—including whether Arkan is actually dead—we should believe. Nevertheless, a chilling, eye-opening account of a madman who deserves a choice seat in the pantheon of the 20th-century’s most evil criminals.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-35606-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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