Joseph Heller would have felt right at home in this absurd and murderous milieu. (b&w photos)
A rambling memoir of the doomed effort to bring peace to Bosnia, from a British officer in the United Nations force.
The UN was wary when Britain proposed career military man Stankovic for assignment to Bosnia in 1992, fearing he might bring along an agenda inherited from his parents, Yugoslavian immigrants of Serbian ancestry. (His mother and father weren't too keen about the assignment either.) But he was one of only three Britons proposed who could speak the language, and the UN desperately needed translators. Stankovic became much more than that: demonstrating an ability to climb right into the Serbian leaders' heads, he ended up as a fixer entrusted to make deals. His book immerses readers in a mad world whose feuds are traced back with obscene pride to the battle of Kosovo in 1389. In this society of 700-year-old grudges, where neither trust nor the notion of tolerance exists, the UN never has a chance. Stankovic traces his time in Bosnia through contemporary diary-like entries and later “sessions” with a psychiatrist after his arrest under Britain’s draconian Official Secrets Act. (The charges of spying for the Serbians certainly sound ludicrous, even taking into account the fact that Stankovic is doing the telling; the fact that he was eventually released suggests they were baseless.) Though the bluster can get thick—“red hot steel fragments slicing through aluminum, piercing the fuel tank, which we were sitting on, and wooooossssh . . . frying tonight! Fuck this!”—Stankovic does a terrific job of clarifying the testosterone-driven conflict between the NATO and UN forces, the former a fighting machine, the latter a vehicle for peace, but both happy to turn Bosnia into “a mad professor’s laboratory in which a very unpleasant war was used as a proving ground to define the set of the New World Disorder.”
Joseph Heller would have felt right at home in this absurd and murderous milieu. (b&w photos)Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-00-257024-6
Page Count: 476
Publisher: HarperCollins UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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