Blood and Vengeance: One Family's Story of the War in Bosnia

Chuck Sudetic has written an excellent book which weaves the experiences of one family in the Serbian conflict with the Muslims Bosnia into the larger political and social context of violence and aggression. The book is a page turner, written in a very engaging journalistic style. The author's criticism of Muslim and Serb atrocities alike appears balanced, and his anger at the failures of politicians and peacekeepers shines clear. The experiences of the Celik family make the massacres and assassinations very real, the reader will be riveted as to the welfare of each family member as they try to escape the violence.The reader will find that the book gives them an excellent overview of the conflict both in the experiences of individuals and in the political and military decision making.

During the war in Bosnia, I am ashamed to say that I understood very little about what was really going on. The situation seemed so complex that I was put off reading any articles that might then have shed light on my ignorance. Now, with this remarkable book, I have finally come to understand what really happened. Chuck Sudetic skilfully takes you from the birth of Christ, the Romans, the Ottoman invasions and finally to the situation today. He narrates the war period from the point of view of the Celik family. And in so doing he succeeds in breaking your heart as he recounts the human disaster that took place. Everyone should read this book.

This great book exposes truths that the world needs to hear, and acknowledge. First, the convenient fallacy that all sides in the Bosnian war were equally guilty of the evils perpetrated there. They weren't. Sudetic also dispenses with the international community's implication that the corrosive violence of 1992 - 1995 was inevitable. It wasn't, but rather was deliberately manipulated by nationalist Serb leaders. And he damningly shreds the fiction that the U.N. did what it could to prevent the Srebrenica massacre, exposing an unbelievable moral cowardice & incompetence, particularly of Bernard Janvier & Yasushi Akashi. Riveting, searing, ultimately heartbreaking. Read it.

After reading tremendous books like David Rohde's "End Game," Holbrooke's "To End a War," Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts," Rebecca West's "Black Lamb, Grey Falcon," Michael Sells' "A Bridge Betrayed," and a host of others, this one stands out as the very best yet written on Bosnia. Sudetic successfully weaves the macro policy issues with an in-the-trenches view of one family's experience in Srebrenica. The end product is a devastating indictment of the international community for allowing atrocities like this to occur again, after similar incidents occuring in WWII Germany, Post Vietnam Cambodia, Guatemala and Rwanda. After seeing the aftermath of Srebrenica's downfall in person and knowing many of the people involved, I can say that Sudetic has unquestionably written the definitive account of this tragic chapter in Bosnia's history.

Chuck Sudetic has written one of the most important books of the 1990s. I can attest from first-hand knowledge of the Balkans that this work is astonishingly unbiased, even as it is wrenching in its descriptions of the effects of an unwanted war on average men and women. By mid-book, the reader may begin to feel that too much detail has been accumulated on the families the author follows through the Bosnian nightmare--but then, in a matter of pages, the horror begins. First, comes a series of random cruelties, then broader atrocities, until the book climaxes in its unforgettable description of the siege and fall of Srebrenica, one of the worst (and most preventable) tragedies of our time. This is when the richness of the family saga begins to resound--Sudetic recreated a now-lost world then let us witness its destruction. It is a work of great commitment and honesty. This book captures the desperation, ignorance, cowardice, heroism, corruption and indestructible hopes of men and women swept up in a war they never fully comprehended. This, not the diplomatic headlines, is the bitter reality of our times for millions of human beings, from the Balkans to Indonesia. Sudetic is not an elegant stylist, but for the purposes of such a grim narrative, his "Joe Friday," deadpan prose serves far better than would a more self-consciously literary approach. While other fine books have been written about the self-destruction of Yugoslavia (Tom Gjelten's "Sarajevo Daily" comes to mind), I find "Blood and Vengeance" an indispensible work. By telling the intertwined stories of Muslim and Serb Orthodox families on one mountainside, Sudetic encapsulates the broad tragedy of a region. I cannot recommend this book too strongly, and feel it would better serve as a text for today's university students than a library full of theoretical works on international relations. Chuck Sudetic has captured the harshness of our world, as well as the ineradicable human will to survive, in a book that deserves far greater recognition than it has received. Please read this book--and give it as a gift to those around you who merit a richer understanding of the post-Cold War world. I only wish I could place a copy directly into the hands of each person reading this review.