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Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize


Peter Maass went to the Balkans as a reporter at the height of the nightmarish war there, but this book is not traditional war reportage. Maass examines how an ordinary Serb could wake up one morning and shoot his neighbor, once a friend--then rape that neighbor's wife. He conveys the desperation that makes a Muslim beg the United States to bomb his own city in order to end the misery. And Maass does not falter at the spectacle of U.N. soldiers shining searchlights on fleeing refugees--who are promptly gunned down by snipers waiting in the darkness. Love Thy Neighbor gives us an unflinching vision of a late-20th-century hell that is also a scathing inquiry into the worst extremes of human nature. Like Michael Herr's Dispatches (also available in Vintage paperback), it is an utterly gripping book that will move and instruct readers for years to come.

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Library Journal Review

Maass, a widely respected reporter for the Washington Post, has produced an excellent account of the "tragedy and absurdity" of the Bosnian war. While the subject has already been well treated in such works as David Rieff's Slaughterhouse (LJ 2/15/95), Maass's book is distinguished by a particular sense of drama and by the author's access to the war's leading personalities. We move from the "disarming sincerity" of the mendacious Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic to the desperate and angry Bosnian vice president Ejup Ganic and the "evil genius" of the war, Serbian president Slobadan Milosevic. Maass concludes in profound sympathy with the Muslims, whose "fatal mistakes" were to discount the threat to their minority status and to believe that the "wild beast [of aggressive nationalism] had been tamed." This attitude sustains a passion that may breach the "respectable distance" of professional journalism while it questions whether such distance is compatible with exceptional reporting. Highly recommended for all libraries. [See also David Owens's Balkan Odyssey, LJ 2/15/96.‘Ed.]‘Zachary T. Irwin, Pennsylvania State Univ., Erie (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Torture, mass murder of civilians, rape and looting are common occurrences in Washington Post staff writer Maass's intensely personal firsthand report on the war in the former Yugoslavia, based on his tour as a foreign correspondent in 1992-1993 and supplemented by up-to-date political analysis. His disturbing mosaic portrays ordinary individuals caught up in an ongoing tragedy. Rejecting the Serbs' claim that they faced imminent genocide at the hands of a radical Muslim dictatorship in Bosnia, Maass charges that Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and his fellow nationalist extremists used the specter of Islamic persecution as a smoke screen behind which to pursue their expansionist dreams of a Greater Serbia. Maass interviews Milan Koracevic, the unrepentant Serb warlord who supervised ``ethnic cleansing'' in Bosnia, and he scathingly limns Charles Redman, U.S. special envoy to the Geneva peace talks. To Maass, President Clinton and his western European allies are weak-willed appeasers whose agenda was to give the Serbs virtually everything they wanted and to award half of Bosnia to Serbia. BOMC alternate; author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

From his experience in 1992^-93 as the Washington Post's reporter in Bosnia, Maass has woven this tapestry of that province's misery. Its main figures are the depraved gunslingers who inflict atrocities in the name of history, personal grudges, or perhaps nothing at all. Maass met many of these odoriferous, toothless killers at roadblocks, barriers used to extort money from journalists or to frighten them away from some locale getting an ethnic scrubbing. Recounting the hazards of the job, Maass remarks on the dangers that war zone journalists run; several he knew were killed in Bosnia. But he realized that however bad his situation became, that of the victims whose stories he told was hopeless. Their tales make distressing reading, needless to say, but as edifying bearing of witness, Maass' stories aim to illustrate how once-peaceable neighbors fell into jungle law. He ascribes the whole tragedy to the primitive beast within, the connivance of self-serving Serb politicians without, and UN ineptitude. This capsule of perplexed outrage complements David Rieff's Slaughterhouse [BKL Mr 15 95], an overview of international wrangling about Bosnia. --Gilbert Taylor

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Peter Maass is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and has reported from the Middle East, Asia, South America and Africa. He has written as well for The New Yorker , The Atlantic Monthly , The Washington Post, and Slate . Maass is the author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War , which chronicled the Bosnian war and won prizes from the Overseas Press Club and the Los Angeles Times . He lives in New York City.