Dominique Y. (NaughtyLittleMinx) reviewed Love Thy Neighbor : A Story of War on + 103 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
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.
This was a fast and easy read. Highly recommended for anyone who is interested in what happended to Yugoslavia. The writer was so descriptive and honest. By reading this book i now feel that i know what happened during between the serbs and the bosnians. So sad!
I read about 100 pages in this book and just could not get into it. It is well-written but its about the war in Bosnia and just wasen't my cup of tea. I have read other books by Peter Maas and really enjoyed them. I think because of the atrocities and mayhem I just couldn't get past them. This is probably a man's book, someone who is really interested in some of the world's problems. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in world affairs
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. Maass gives us an unflinching vision of a late 20th century hell that is also a scathing inquiry into the worst extremes of human nature. This is an utterly gripping book that will continue to move and instruct readers for years.
