Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War: Amazon.ca: Peter Maass: Books

Product Description

From Amazon

Peter Maass from the center of the nightmare in Bosnia, a war correspondent's montage of images - eerie, grotesque, ironic, angry, absurd. A Serb and Muslim, friends before the war, exchanging gossip via shortwave radio hours before they will try to kill each other. The Serbian president coolly denying reports of atrocities that have been witnessed by hundreds. A battlefield doctor performing miracles of surgery without anesthetic. Drivers without headlights gambling their lives in the darkness of no-man's-land while schoolchildren scamper across Sniper Alley. The author takes us with him into the minefields of modern war with a fierce, vivid, and personal book. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Product Description

Tag this product

(What's this?)

Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items.

Customer Reviews

38 Reviews

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

Average Customer Review

4.6 out of 5 stars (38 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most helpful customer reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Riveting account, April 24 2001

By

J. Rabideau (Stuck in the Loser State) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (Paperback)

Certainly this is a riveting account of some of the specific atrocities observed by the author (foreign correspondent). Where some reviewers have found this a particularly compelling work because of the absence of analysis provided, I find it instead lacking: leaving the audience to draw their own conclusions, instead of endeavouring to provide both an account as well as an interpretation, and giving us a sense of the account's relation to broader affairs, is for me sub-optimal. Also, in the absence of analysis, it almost seems as though the author has chosen to relate specific accounts for their sheer goriness, intending to shock his audience...into what, I don't know.

While there are numerous books providing anecdotes of the Yugoslav civil wars, and numerous books analysing the origins and manifestations of Yugoslav civil conflict, there is a real dearth of work blending the two...this is unfortunately no exception.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Report abuse

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A walk in Bosnia, Jun 9 2002

By

warrior1978 (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (Paperback)

This was not a bad book if you're looking for a journalist's point of view. I've been to Bosnia and Kosovo. This is a walk through Bosnia from a jounalist's perspective. It misses the historical background and any real analysis for actions of the Bosniacs, Croats, or Bosnian Serbs. The book is written with a Bosniac bias and is not objective.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Report abuse

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An angry man's compelling history lesson, Oct 23 2000

By

heather tyler (sydney, nsw Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (Paperback)

Peter Maass was a Washington Post correspondent in Bosnia 1992-93 and this is his riveting, emotive account of the war. Maass echoes many of us when he unashamedly asks the most difficult questions: Why did 250,000 Bosians lose their lives, why can't Muslims and Christians work their differences out after so long, why did genocide occur in Europe when at the end of WW II the world declared it would never happen again, why was the UN impotent once it got into Bosnia, why is the thin skin of civility easily torn and the brutality that lies beneath so easily provoked? Maass was not a cynical, hotel room hero that gives journalism a bad name, those hacks more interested in boasting in the bar and filing stories from second-hand accounts provided by local help-meets. He did his job well and came away shell-shocked, angry and fundamentally changed by what he saw: UN troops standing by while atrocities took place, how residents of Sarajevo nightly ran the gauntlet of the airport, surgeons operating without drugs, children dying on the daily water run, snipers on opposing sides chatting to one another on a two-way radio, the flourishing drug trade, people cheating, lying, killing and stealing to keep their loved ones alive. Maass speculates a little too much - some judicious editing wouldn't have gone astray - and he cannot adequately analyse the causes of the war and the outcomes for the victims involved but this was not his job anyway. He was there as a recorder of events that became a black mark in history and that he did, admirably. Maass, like veteran journalist Simon Winchester who succinctly wrote of the later crisis in Kosovo and asked similar questions, gave ordinary victims of this war a voice. While such journalistic accounts lack historical perspective because their focus is on the immediacy, their evidence is invaluable. We need such accounts, so when the spectre of genocide is raised again we can hold up books like these and say: "Haven't we learned anything yet?"

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Report abuse

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See all 38 customer reviews on Amazon.ca

Want to see more reviews on this item?

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 49 reviews 4.6 out of 5 stars

Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Gripping, shocking, and simply terrifying!
This book showed how terrible the War in Bosnia really was. The media failed to show us the bloodbath that it became. Read more

Published on Sep 19 2003

5.0 out of 5 stars Human Memory is a dangerous thing...
This is not the difinitive history of the Bosnian war. It's one journalist's account of his experience covering the war, published soon after the Dayton peace accords, making it... Read more

Published on May 2 2003 by Susan E. Neill