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
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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