Two experienced international reporters examine the life and political career of the Yugoslav president. Doder (foreign correspondent for the Washington Post) and Branson (correspondent for The Scotsman), who most recently teamed to write Gorbachev: The Last Tsar (1990), begin this highly critical biography in March 1999 as US envoy Richard Holbrooke tries in vain to convince Slobodan Milosevic to sign a Kosovo treaty with NATO. They turn then to charting the career of Milosevic (whose first name derives from a Serbo-Croatian word for “freedom”) from his “humble and inauspicious” birth in 1941 to Serbian parents to his tragic miscalculation of NATO’s resolve during the bombing campaign of 1999. A talented student (first in his high school class and near the top of his law school class at Belgrade University), Milosevic rose slowly to power by attaching himself to the more ambitious and charismatic Ivan Stambolic and then ousting him, principally by stirring—and shaking—the “potent cocktail of Serb nationalism.— From the subtitle on, the authors can barely restrain their contempt for their hero. They condemn his “consummate capacity for lying, intrigue, and secrecy” and dub him “the Saddam Hussein of Europe” and “the high priest of chaos.— Drawing on their many years of experience in Yugoslavia, Doder and Branson guide readers skillfully through the murky labyrinth of Balkan history, pausing to explain the sources of the ethnic hatreds that erupted when the years of Communist domination came to an end, and summarizing with brilliant clarity such recent diplomatic events as the Dayton peace accords and the subsequent talks in Rambouillet, France (a “debacle,” they conclude). No one in the region, we learn, wears a white hat. Doder and Branson remind us, for example, that Albanians fought with Germany during WW II—and massacred Serbs in the process. A clear, well-crafted guide to a volatile region; a devastating analysis of the depravity of a despot. (1 map, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-84308-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
