April 1st, 1992. My father was five months and twenty days away from dying. On that day, Serbians commenced their brutal attack on Bosnia. I think I might have done damage to my psyche to read about Bosnia and Guernica in the same month...To wipe out an entire community or ethnicity for absolutely no reason other than pure dominance is unfathomable.
Line that gave me pause, "There was even a slip of paper from the library saying they didn't posses any overdue books" (p 86). Imagine giving up everything you own, including items you don't, like books borrowed from the library. The business of the bureau for ethnic cleansing demanded Bosnians claim they handed over all worldly possessions to a Serbian. This act does not encompass the horrific violence, but rather the senseless humility.
About the violence. Most of the time I found myself twisting and twitching in my chair, wanting to turn away from the sentences of torture Maas wrote. I am one of those fat and happy and white privileged people who blissfully and ignorantly cite misunderstanding when it comes to the war in Bosnia. I was oblivious to the death and destruction with the exception of what the U.S. media decided or cared to reveal to me. What baffles me the most is that, like the Hutu and Tutsi, Serbs and Bosnians at one time got along like neighbors and family. Another war similarity from forty years earlier, like Franco denying the bombing of Guernica, Serbia denied the bombing of Bosnia was their responsibility. Death and destruction is not a macabre mirage and yet they do refuse see or own it. The practice of modern warfare with age-old atrocities was hard to read. Maas takes his time to carefully humanize the narrative by inserting personal anecdotes from his own life. ( )

"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. Most war reportage
cannot explain how an ordinary Serb could wake up one morning and shoot his
neighbor, once a friend - then rape his neighbor's wife. It cannot convey the
desperation that would make a Muslim beg the United States to bomb his own city
in order to end his own misery. And most reporters would falter at the
spectacle of U.N. soldiers shining searchlights on fleeing refugees - who are
promptly gunned down by snipers waiting in the darkness.
This book gives us an unflinching vision of a late-twentieth-century hell that
is also a scathing inquiry into the worst extremes of human nature. It is an
utterly gripping book that will continue to move and instruct readers for years
to come." --back cover

I'm torn about this book. The beginning was a bit confusing, as the author doesn't really spell the scene out easily for the reader. This book requires you to read a couple of chapters before you figure out what's going on. Once I got the gist of the political circumstances of the time, it became a slightly easier read. The author is a journalist, and you can tell by his writing style--he writes to shock the reader. This is effective the first couple of times, but it becomes repetitive when he deals out his punch lines to shock you multiple times within the span of only a few pages. I pressed on, however. As you progress, you get a better feel for the situation and the author becomes slightly more personable. This is a heavier read where you'll find yourself reading the gory details of individual torture stories, to slogging through descriptions of the West's failing foreign policy. This book did not make me an expert on Bosnia by any means, but I get the general idea of what happened during the war, and perhaps more importantly, I'm reminded of the beast that lies within humanity, no matter how strongly we try to convince ourselves that we are learning from our mistakes in history and moving forward as more civilized beings. I do admire the author for spilling it all out there and shamelessly calling out the leaders for burying their morals and indulging "the beast." Good book if you're a history buff or interested in modern foreign policy. But this is not a book that I would recommend to someone unless they have a "severe interest." ( )

What a gripping book. I read it all the way through once, and I've tried to pick it up and re-read it a time or two, but I just can't do it. The scenes that he describes are horrible enough; the actual people living through them are just tragic.

Maass describes the city of Sarajevo as it was, goes through the smell of a human who has made it through to a gymnasium serving as a refugee camp in the early days of the bombing, and the finally into the details of what happened in Sarajevo.

Especially sad to read are the inhabitants' lives before this war started. There was no warning; none. One home had the approval document for a build-out on his home that was due to begin in a few days, as an example. The war-lords of the Serbs are quite well documented, and this was the book that finally made me see how impossible the situation was for the Bosnian Muslims: the Serbs (and Croats) were convincing the rest of the world that the Muslims were evil, the Muslims were armed, and no one else should get involved.

With all of the recent pardons from the World Court of the Serbs who helped perpetrate this genocide, everyone on that Court in Brussels should be forced to read this book. There is just no getting it out of your mind. ( )

Amazing book which does not overdose on the gory but gives a sense of what it might be like to live day after day for two or three years in a horrific war. His description of life in Banja Luka for Muslims is harrowing, his visits to the cleaned up concentration camps, and his description of the young man shot on Sniper Alley in Sarajevo. Unforgettable. He even met Milosevic one on one. He does not dismiss the Serbs as primitives, or single out Rwandans, or isolate anybody, rather, the capacity to evil is in all of us. God help us! Many fun/ironic/sardonic observations. ( )