Publisher's Weekly Review
At once a stunning piece of war reporting and a heartbreaking, deeply personal story, Sudetic's account of Yugoslavia's bloody breakup enfolds a family saga into an epic historical chronicle. Sudetic is a former New York Times correspondent, a Croatian-American now living in Belgrade. His Serb wife is related to the Celiks, a Muslim family who narrowly escaped death as refugees in Srebrenica in 1995, when Bosnian Serbs overran a U.N. "safe area" and decimated and expelled the town's Muslim-majority population. Tracing the Celiks' history over five generations, Sudetic illumines the inner workings of Tito's police state, charting the family's survival through the German invasion of Yugoslavia and under Communist rule. He brings history into the present when Serbia's president Slobodan Milosevic, "the prime mover in Yugoslavia's slide into chaos," precipitated a warÄwith the aid of his accomplice, Croatian president Franjo TudjmanÄby seizing Muslim territory. The war, according to Sudetic, was basically a landgrab by Milosevic, but was cleverly presented to the West as an age-old ethnic conflict or a struggle between Christianity and Islam. Shocking in its graphic account of atrocities committed by all sides, Sudetic's unsettling narrative gives human dimensions to a historical tragedy. Photos. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
This exploration of a family's experience during the Bosnian war provides unique and harrowing insight into Bosnian Serb-Muslim relations. Sudetic, a Croatian-American, made a name for himself as a hardened and accomplished war journalist for the New York Times in the early 1990s. Desensitized to the daily carnage (he describes imagining himself viewing it from an observation tower), he loved the exhilaration of the job but felt that his newspaper pieces failed to capture ``the deep structure of Bosnia itself, especially peasant Bosnia, lumpen Bosnia, the Bosnia the war had ravaged most.'' Establishing contact with the Celik family, his wife's relatives, presented him the opportunity to do just that. The extraordinary result, Blood and Vengeance, accomplishes precisely what its author set out to do, and more. Through vast personal interviewing and research, Sudetic relates the Celiks' experience of war from their origins in an isolated mountain hamlet north of Viegrad to their ill-fated flight to doomed Srebrenica, and their final flight to a refugee camp in Tuzla. But while the narrative focuses on the Celiks (who seem intimately familiar by the book's end), this account also follows the fate of Bosnian Serb families from their village. The story is rich in illuminating detail. In engaging prose, Sudetic acquaints us with the rhythms of daily life and interaction between the Bosnian Serbs and Muslims in the village of Kupusovici, as well as with their complex historical relations throughout the centuries. He sensitively evokes the character and mood of the village and this region bordering on Serbia that includes some of Bosnia's most devastated towns. In particular, Blood and Vengeance adds to our understanding of the horror that was Srebrenica before the Celiks and other Muslim refugees underwent expulsion or mass execution by Bosnian Serbs in July 1995. Among the spate of books the Bosnian crisis has generated, Sudetic's tale of one family's struggle for survival is an essential and lasting contribution.
Booklist Review
To laypersons and often to historians, the suppressed hatreds and atrocities unleashed by the war in Bosnia remain enigmatic; the basis for the murderous hostility between groups without significant linguistic or racial distinctions puzzles and frustrates outsiders. Sudetic is a Croatian American journalist with family ties to his principal protagonists, the members of the Muslim Celik family. His recounting of that family's fate amid the horrors of the supposed "safe haven" of the mining town of Srebenica places a heartbreakingly human face on the mind-numbing statistics of the raped, starved, and slaughtered. Sudetic also does a masterful job of placing the ethnic hostilities of Bosnia within a historical context as he examines the genesis of hatreds during the Turkish conquests of the Balkans. There are few great heroes or arch villains in this saga; instead, we see ordinary people clawing to survive in extraordinary circumstances that they neither created nor fully understand. This depressing but immensely moving work makes a valiant effort at explaining what may, ultimately, remain beyond full comprehension. --Jay Freeman
Choice Review
Most "sociological" analyses of the recent war in Bosnia have been written by journalists, e.g., Noel Malcom's Bosnia: A Short History (CH, Apr'95), Roy Gutman's Witness to Genocide (1993), and Peter Maas's Love Thy Neighbor (1996), among many others. Sudetic concentrates on the fall of the "safe havens" of Zepa and Srebrenica (the best account of that event this reviewer has read) into Serbian hands. He writes primarily, but not exclusively, through the perspective of one family's tragedies in this war, engaging in history, old-fashioned journalism, and even some autobiography, in addition to a postmodern sort of ethnography. The result is eclectic and uneven. Unlike most historians, Sudetic notes that WW II Chetniks sought to exterminate Muslims. But he makes historical errors, as when he claims that "Hitler also created the puppet 'Independent State of Croatia' and endowed it with all of Bosnia." The most problematic aspect of this work is the author's conclusion that both victims (Bosnian Muslims and Croats) and victimizers (Serbs) are the same when it came to stories and "memories of a time long before the war." In the prologue, Sudetic confesses that he obtained his facts through the method of "detachment, disinterestedness, dispassion, distancing." This journalistic attitude is at odds with the social scientist's efforts to attain "empathetic understanding." Sudetic has grafted journalistic methodology onto a sociological search for "deep structures" (his words). The result is a unique study, yet one cruel to the victims of Serbian-sponsored genocide. Very limited bibliography, extensive index. General readers; graduate, faculty. S. G. Mestrovi'c; Texas A&M University
Library Journal Review
With thorough, textured reportage Sudetic, who wrote for the New York Times from Bosnia throughout the war, examines the conflict there through the lens of one Muslim family. He follows the Celiks through several generations as they struggle to survive displacement and the loss of family members. His insightful historical analysis establishes invaluable context for readers as they plunge into the complicated historical and political animosities that tore multiple generations apart. Traveling deep behind the headlines, Sudetic's tale offers a lasting contribution to our knowledge about one of the most devastating conflicts of our time. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
