Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War

New York Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1996. 1996. Hardcover. 8vo hardcover 305pp index. very good / very good d/w. From the center of the nightmare in Bosnia, a war correspondent's flaming montage of images - eerie, grotesque, ironic, angry, absurd. A Serb and a Muslim, friends before the war, exchanging gossip via shortwave radio only hours before they will try to kill each other. A Sarajevo couple passionately refusing to go anywhere together for fear a mortar shell might orphan their children. A battlefield doctor performing miracles of surgery without anesthetics. In episode after episode, Peter Maass takes us with him into the minefields of modern war: a whole country is the battleground, every living being in it a combatent. His fierce, vivid, truth-telling and deeply personal book makes us see the devil under the skin - and the thinness of the line between civilization and chaos.nnFROM THE CRITICSnnChris William Erdmannn...[H]ad I not read [Love Thy Neighbor], conversations like this would have kept me in the dark, morally and spiritually inattentive to the power of propaganda and self-delusion. -Books & Culture: A Christian ReviewnnPublishers WeeklynnTorture, mass murder of civilians, rape and looting are common occurrences in Washington Post staff writer Maass' 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.nnBookList - Gilbert TaylornnFrom 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, an overview of international wrangling about Bosnia.nnChris William Erdmannn...[H]ad I not read [Love Thy Neighbor], conversations like this would have kept me in the dark, morally and spiritually inattentive to the power of propaganda and self-delusion. -- Books & Culture: A Christian ReviewnnKirkus ReviewsnnA journalist's remarkably penetrating and unapologetically opinionated account of the war in Bosnia and how it changed the way he perceives himself and humankind. Enough time has elapsed for a steady stream of journalistic accounts of fighting in th .