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Virtual Macedonia Bookstore - Hearts Grown Brutal:: Sagas of Sarajevo
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List Price: $29.95
Our Price: $12.00
Your Save: $ 17.95 ( 60% )
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Manufacturer: Random House
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 949.703
EAN: 9780679452430
ISBN: 0679452435
Label: Random House
Manufacturer: Random House
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 523
Publication Date: 1998-08-25
Publisher: Random House
Release Date: 1998-08-25
Studio: Random House
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Well-written account of the atrocities in Bosnia
Comment: I couldn't put this book down. Every page, every line tells the truth behind the Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian conflict. All wars are complex and difficult to comprehend but Mr. Cohen helps us understand what happened just a few years ago. An accurate and eye-opening account. Some of the atrocities committed are so heinous, so vile as to bring us right back to images of the Third Reich. This is a very important work by a man who knows what he is talking about.
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Summary: If you live an enire life and only read one book
Comment: this is the book to read. Its absolutely fantastic. Roger Cohen has a very sharp pen. For me its not just enough to read the book myself, I want to buy other copies and give to friends.
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Summary: THE definative account of the Bosnian war
Comment: The destruction of Yugoslavia is not the easiest of subjects to fully comprehend. Cohen's informative and excellently written narrative is the best place to start. Cohen does more than just describe the events, he attempts to get beneath the surface to understand the psychology behind the unspeakable atrocities committed during the various wars. The trajedy of Yugoslavia cannot be understood without a recounting of the atrocities committed there during World War II, atrocities that largely went unpunished. All of this and more are recounted by Cohen in his very readable account. It is must reading for anyone interested in recent European history.
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Summary: Extract from �Books on Bosnia�, London 1999
Comment: A big, passionate book by the New York Times correspondent, who has tried to pack everything into it: the Bosnian experience of the war (told through several family histories), the Western response and UN policy, and the historical background. Cohen argues well against the `ethnic hatreds' doctrine, but tends to substitute World War II hatreds instead. However, his analysis of UN failure, including evidence drawn from minutes of a high-level meeting held before the fall of Srebrenica, will be of lasting importance
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Summary: A sad, depressing, and brutally honest book
Comment: After a few hundred pages, when your ability to read about another Balkans family and their plight begins to wane, Cohen presents some new detail in an individual life that forces you to refocus on how the war crushed people so much like Americans and so very European that the "ancient hatreds" argument becomes sickening. To read about a 16-year-old girl's Tom Cruise poster and her death by shelling is to realize how much the West failed. Compelling, brutal, depressing, and vital reading.
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Editorial Reviews:
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In this brilliant book, Roger Cohen of The New York Times takes us to the core of one of the twentieth century's most complex stories, weaving together the history of Yugoslavia and the story of the Bosnian War of 1992 to 1995, as experienced by four families.
"I have tried to treat the story of Yugoslavia, which lived for seventy-three years, as a human one," Cohen writes in this masterly book, which, like Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem and David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb, makes us eyewitnesses at the center of historic events. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the Bosnian conflict shattered the West's confidence, reviving Europe's darkest ghosts and exposing an America reluctant to confront or acknowledge an act of genocide on European soil. Through Cohen's compelling reconstruction of the twentieth-century history that led up to the war, and his account of the war's effect on everyday lives, we at last find the key to understanding Europe's most explosive region and its peoples.
"This was a war of intimate betrayals," Cohen goes on to say, and in Hearts Grown Brutal, the betrayals begin in the family of a man named Sead. Through his search for his lost father, we relive the history of Yugoslavia, founded at the end of World War I with the encouragement of President Woodrow Wilson. Sead's desperate quest is punctuated by the lies, half truths, and pain that mark other sagas of Yugoslavia. Through three more families--one Muslim-Serb, one Muslim, and one Serb-Croat--we experience the war in Bosnia as it breaks up marriages and sets relative against relative. The reality of the Balkans is illuminated, even as the hypocrisy of the international response to the war is exposed.
Hearts Grown Brutal is a remarkable book, a testament to the loss of a multi-ethnic European state and a warning that the violence could return. It is a magnificent achievement that blends history and journalism into a profoundly moving human story.
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