A tense, gritty journey into postwar Kosovo, one that turns the stomach and troubles the conscience.
In this novel based on true events, a young soldier fights a war with himself amid the chaos and carnage of Kosovo.
In 2001, Ragnitz was in his late 20s when he volunteered for a mission that would cause him to question all he believed as a professional soldier. A military policeman with the German Bundeswehr, Ragnitz served in Kosovo as part of a multinational peacekeeping force following the collapse of Yugoslavia. In 2001, his unit was tasked with overseeing a prison camp of suspected Albanian terrorists at Dubrava. Unarmed and with little training, Ragnitz was thrust into the role of prison guard. As tensions at Dubrava escalated, Ragnitz grew increasingly uncomfortable with the mission, which he suspected was illegal and in violation of the inmates’ rights. Vivid, graphic and unsettling, the book is a factual account of Ragnitz’s Kosovo experiences told in a novellike format. Two parallel storylines seize the reader and never let go. One tells of an individual solider grappling with “everyday insanity in the Balkans.” Kosovo is portrayed as a fractious, strife-ridden land where politics, religion and violence are hopelessly intertwined. Ragnitz was told he was guarding “suspected terrorists,” but that never seemed entirely true. He watched in shame as the detainees were suddenly transferred to a group of Americans, their fates unknown. The second storyline tells how Ragnitz’s inability to cope with the emotions festering inside him destroyed his relationship with his girlfriend, Katja. The abrupt shifts between storylines can be jarring, but the two ultimately converge in a powerful moment of release for Ragnitz. Eventually, he confided to Katja that he felt exploited by the military. One of the author’s stated aims is to tell the story of Dubrava, especially now that revelations of abuse at Guantanamo have surfaced. What Ragnitz thought was a humanitarian mission became an affront to human dignity, which reflects a major theme of the book: how quickly moral boundaries become blurred. The book’s title encapsulates the conflict—Ragnitz the soldier does his duty, but it does not sit well with Ragnitz the man.
A tense, gritty journey into postwar Kosovo, one that turns the stomach and troubles the conscience.Pub Date: April 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492260523
Page Count: 248
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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