Starred review from August 3, 1998
Cohen admits that his experience covering the Bosnian War for the New York Times changed him. He counts himself fortunate not to have been destroyed, like the estimated 200,000 dead or the living whose lives were deranged by the war's terror. This is a long book, thick with metaphor that struggles to describe the unspeakable. The ethnic mistrust reignited by Slobodan Milosevic had been buried in Bosnia generations ago. Through four "typical" families, whose personal histories form part of Bosnia's own, Cohen shows how Serb, Muslim, Croat and Jew had become so inextricably linked that their identity could be nothing other than Bosnian Yugoslav. Serb fanaticism not only estranged neighbors but broke the bonds between families and even between husbands and wives. NATO nations, with massive strength poised against potential Soviet threats to the Balkans, became impotent and flagrantly manipulated by an ambiguous enemy. Cohen's indignant questions reverberate--What stripped the West of moral courage just 40 years after the Holocaust? What compelled the U.N. to insist on a fantastic and suicidal impartiality in the face of atrocity? What allows mass psychosis to grip an entire nation? With the foundations of democracy safely inherited, do we abjure courage and responsibility, to pursue consumer comforts whatever the spiritual cost? His conclusions are not auspicious. Bosnia epitomized a triumph of tolerance; in its loss, he doubts our capacity to achieve it again. Editor, Kate Medina; agent, Amanda Urban, ICM.