An utterly compelling chronicle from a master scholar and clear writer.
This scrupulously researched work by a skilled interviewer of “imprisoned perpetrators” focuses on the making of the genocidal Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić.
Between 2014 and 2016, Stern (Global Studies/Boston Univ.; Denial: A Memoir of Terror, 2010, etc.) held a dozen conversations with the war criminal, now imprisoned for life in the Scheveningen Prison in The Hague. Though interviews with such high-profile war criminals had not been sanctioned by the International Criminal Tribunal—the first international war crimes court established since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials at the end of World War II—the ICT ultimately agreed, acknowledging Stern’s meticulous methods and hoping her research might yield valuable information about Karadžić’s motives. Karadžić came to power as the former Yugoslavia’s ethnically divided federations began to declare their independence in the early 1990s, and the once-dominant Serbs of Bosnia, in the minority to the majority Bosnian Muslims, feared (or were incited to fear) that they were losing their status and privileges. The culmination of fear and hate erupted in the genocide at Srebrenica in July 1995, when the Bosnian Serb army captured the town and executed thousands of surrendered men and boys. Appearing as a cultured, intelligent “gentleman,” Karadžić created a whole other entity as an “energy healer” and poet while on the lam for 12 years, and he believed that he was a hero for his beleaguered people. Stern’s account of their interviews is a riveting battle of the wills, as the author chronicles her battle against Karadžić’s manipulation and attempts to see some remorse. Yet he was unrepentant in protecting “his” people from exaggerated threats and demographic changes, and he used fearmongering tactics that Stern recognizes as being currently practiced by the U.S. government. Ultimately, the author provides a subtle, powerful illustration of terror that resonates today, especially regarding the resurgent white supremacist movement. The deep, extensive footnotes and detailed timeline attest to Stern’s meticulous research.
An utterly compelling chronicle from a master scholar and clear writer.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-088955-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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