An important contribution to the literature surrounding the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the ethnic wars that followed.
A welcome biography of the “Butcher of the Balkans,” now awaiting trial before the International War Crimes Tribunal.
Sell, a retired Foreign Service officer who worked in the former Yugoslavia for eight years, turns in a nuanced view of Milosevic, the man, often described as “a brilliant tactician but a disastrous strategist,” who led Serbia into an ultimately self-destructive war in Kosovo after a murderous campaign in Bosnia. Sell describes Milosevic’s rise to power from the role of an obscure, essentially conservative Communist functionary to that of empire-builder of an imagined Greater Serbia. Following the defeat of his chief opponent, Ante Markovic, and the effective withdrawal of Serbia from the de facto economic union established among the new republics of the former Yugoslavia, Milosevic set about dismantling the multiethnic society that, by Sell’s account, most Yugoslavians seemed content to maintain. This program of social disintegration relied on the loyalties and actions of mass murderers—and, perhaps, on the influence of Milosevic’s wife, Mirjana Markovic, whom many Serbians believed “was the true power behind the throne.” Sell observes that Milosevic was also well served by the bumbling of the international community, which did little to stop him despite clear evidence of his intentions. He chastises the Western powers, too, for their failure to address on equal terms the claims of all of the former Yugoslavia’s peoples for self-determination, insisting on maintaining the old internal borders instead of redrawing the map to accommodate the claims of Serbs and Albanians, “whose ethnic borders most deviated from the political ones.” He maintains additionally that NATO’s military intervention was less effective in bringing about the end of Milosevic’s reign than was domestic Serbian political opposition, which orchestrated widespread popular resistance and, in the end, delivered Milosevic for trial in The Hague.
An important contribution to the literature surrounding the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the ethnic wars that followed.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8223-2855-0
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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