Gripping, shocking, and simply terrifying!

books:


	• Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War Peter Maass Vintage, 1997 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 44 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

I have a confession to make...

I have a confession to make - I am guilty of ignorance.

While in 1992 I was taking my first trip to Europe, falling in love for the first time, getting my introduction to Pentecostalism and learning to live, people were being exterminated only several hundred miles away from me.
While I was going into my fourth year of high school education in Bulgaria, boys and girls my age were being raped and tortured and murdered and it took me 15 years to find that out. How is it that I knew nothing about that war? How is it I never paid attention to the news, never took interest in what was happing in Bosnia? How? How come I turned a blind eye to the grizzly events occurring in a land where people spoke Slavic language similar to my own, had features similar to mine, shared history similar to the one of my county? How can I have been so ignorant of the genocide in Bosnia?

Then, in the winter of 1992 I came to the United States and looking back now I find I wasn't the only one guilty of ignorance. For three years (1992-1995) United Nations, countries like Britain, France, Russia and of course, the USA, looked to resolved the conflict by ignoring the direct problem in the region. Peaceful solution is what everyone was talking about and looking for, and all the while men, women, and children died by torture, by fire, by knives to their throats. Over 200,000 people. 200,000 died in this conflict and having read Peter Maass' book I feel disgusted with myself, with humanity in general.

I suspect there were hundreds of other conflicts that occurred and I missed. I know there were many more that history sheltered away from humanity and perhaps I'll never learn about their victims, but having read this book and having learned of the dangerous games politicians and people with power played, I'm left with a nauseating feeling of shame. Shame for being a human and for possessing the realization that evil is something people grow inside, something they cultivate and feed of. For all of our 100,000 years of civilization we have nothing to show except death, destruction and deceit. Is this what we should be proud of? Is this the meaning of life?

I recommend this book to everyone. It's hard to find stories out there that are so open, so raw, so real in their context that make readers seriously wonder what society, civilization, morality and ethics really mean. Mr. Maass, thank you for being so honest.

-by Simon Cleveland

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Gripping, shocking, and simply terrifying!

This book showed how terrible the War in Bosnia really was. The media failed to show us the bloodbath that it became. I am sorry that we as a nation did not do more to help the Muslims in Bosnia. Whether we are Christian, Jew, Muslim, or Atheist we have a moral responsibility to help defend a small country from genocide. The shocking truth in this book opened my eyes but it also deeply depressed me. One is tempted to give up hope in the face of such monstrous reality. We live in a very unpredictable, hostile, and politically unstable world and Peter Maass shows just how evil it can get.

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A little editing would do wonders

This is a fascinating book. Unfortunately the author has a habit of referencing other books (most notably Black Lamb Grey Falcon and Catch-22) far too often, usually just when you've lost youself in the book. His insight and explanations of what he experienced are great but they often stray back and forth in time. This sometimes gets a little hard to follow. All of these could be cured with just a little editing. Other than that the only problem I had with the book is that I wanted to know more of his experiences.

Amazing work by Peter Maass

Peter Maass writes with the utmost compassion for such a tragic story of suffering. Somehow, he sifts through it all and manages to find sense in it and presents it in a very thoughtful, sensitive way.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

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. Maass examines how an ordinary Serb could wake up one morning and shoot his neighbor, once a friend--then rape that neighbor's wife. He conveys the desperation that makes a Muslim beg the United States to bomb his own city in order to end the misery. And Maass does not falter at the spectacle of U.N. soldiers shining searchlights on fleeing refugees--who are promptly gunned down by snipers waiting in the darkness. Love Thy Neighbor gives us an unflinching vision of a late-20th-century hell that is also a scathing inquiry into the worst extremes of human nature. Like Michael Herr's Dispatches (also available in Vintage paperback), it is an utterly gripping book that will move and instruct readers for years to come.

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