Synopses & Reviews
Taking its place on the short list of essential books about the Bosnian struggle, Blood and Vengeance succeeds in putting a human face-on the conflict, rendering its devastation comprehensible to Western readers. Perhaps the most notorious and disputed outrage of the war was the massacre of as many as 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica. Although previously designated a safe area by the United Nations Security Council, Srebrenica was overrun by General Ratko Mladic's Bosnian Serb forces while U.N. peacekeeping troops stood by impotently.
With novelistic eloquence and journalistic acumen, Sudetic follows several generations of the Celiks, the Muslim family he is related to by marriage, which met their tragic destiny at Srebrenica. His indelible portrait of these inhabitants of a remote mountaintop village outside of Srebrenica not only illumines the historical context of the tragedy but, more important, reveals the human impact of the horror. Blood and Vengeance contains the sweep and power of a panoramic historical painting, yet possesses the heartbreaking intimacy of a family snapshot.
Synopsis
"Of all the reporters who covered the Bosnian war, none saw more clearly, dug more deeply or reported more acutely than Chuck Sudetic. Now, with , he has done nothing less than write the defining narrative of the Bosnian conflict. It is an extraordinary achievement." --David Rieff
Synopsis
In July 1995 approximately 7,000 Muslim men, women, and children died under Serbian hands in and around the old Bosnian mining town of Srebrenica." "Blood and Vengeance puts a human face on the grim statistics and tangled politics of this event. Through the odyssey of one Muslim family, the Celiks of the remote mountain village of Kupusovici, journalist Chuck Sudetic tells the epic and tragic story of a people and a nation. His narrative reaches beyond the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, where the Turks conquered the Serbs, and unfolds with sweeping and inexorable power towards the Celiks' rendezvous with history in the so-called "safe area" of Srebrenica.