Blood and Vengeance: One Family's Story of the War in Bosnia - Hardcover

Sudetic, Chuck

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393046516 ISBN 13: 9780393046519

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1998

Synopsis

The events surrounding the genocide of seven thousand Bosnian Muslims in 1995 by Bosnian Serbs is told through the odyssey of one Muslim family, recounting the long and brutal history of the rival factions that claim the area.

About this title

Review:

"There is a method to presenting the reality of war in [New York] Times style," writes Chuck Sudetic, "a restrictive method but a perfectly valid one just the same. It focuses mainly on institutions and political leaders and their duties and decisions, while leaving the common folk to exemplify trends, to serve as types: a fallen soldier, a screaming mother, a dead baby.... The method is described by various terms: detachment, disinterestedness, dispassion, distancing, and others with negative prefixes engineered to obliterate any relationship between observer and observed."

Although Sudetic was able to maintain his detachment for the numerous stories he filed from the frontlines of the Bosnian war for the Times, it could not ultimately last. Blood and Vengeance examines the events leading up to the July 1995 genocidal massacre that took place in and around the town of Srebenica from the perspective of the Celik family (to whom the author is related by marriage). Sudetic ably blends the intimate chaos and terror of the Celiks' lives with broader historical and contemporary accounts that provide a fuller context for what happened. The people here are not types, but vividly portrayed individuals in whose lives the reader gradually becomes absorbed. This book ranks with Peter Maass's Love Thy Neighbor as one of the closest--and most chilling--looks at the tumultuous events that shattered post-cold war Eastern Europe. --Ron Hogan

From the Publisher:

"Blood and Vengeance" has been chosen by "Publisher's Weekly" as one of their Best Books of the Year for 1998.

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0393046516
• ISBN 13: 9780393046519
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 393