An important contribution to the literature surrounding the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the ethnic wars that followed.
A welcome biography of the “Butcher of the Balkans,” now awaiting trial before the International War Crimes Tribunal.
Sell, a retired Foreign Service officer who worked in the former Yugoslavia for eight years, turns in a nuanced view of Milosevic, the man, often described as “a brilliant tactician but a disastrous strategist,” who led Serbia into an ultimately self-destructive war in Kosovo after a murderous campaign in Bosnia. Sell describes Milosevic’s rise to power from the role of an obscure, essentially conservative Communist functionary to that of empire-builder of an imagined Greater Serbia. Following the defeat of his chief opponent, Ante Markovic, and the effective withdrawal of Serbia from the de facto economic union established among the new republics of the former Yugoslavia, Milosevic set about dismantling the multiethnic society that, by Sell’s account, most Yugoslavians seemed content to maintain. This program of social disintegration relied on the loyalties and actions of mass murderers—and, perhaps, on the influence of Milosevic’s wife, Mirjana Markovic, whom many Serbians believed “was the true power behind the throne.” Sell observes that Milosevic was also well served by the bumbling of the international community, which did little to stop him despite clear evidence of his intentions. He chastises the Western powers, too, for their failure to address on equal terms the claims of all of the former Yugoslavia’s peoples for self-determination, insisting on maintaining the old internal borders instead of redrawing the map to accommodate the claims of Serbs and Albanians, “whose ethnic borders most deviated from the political ones.” He maintains additionally that NATO’s military intervention was less effective in bringing about the end of Milosevic’s reign than was domestic Serbian political opposition, which orchestrated widespread popular resistance and, in the end, delivered Milosevic for trial in The Hague.
An important contribution to the literature surrounding the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the ethnic wars that followed.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8223-2855-0
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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