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

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

Chuck Sudetic. W. W. Norton & Company, $26.95 (393pp) ISBN 978-0-393-04651-9

At once a stunning piece of war reporting and a heartbreaking, deeply personal story, Sudetic's account of Yugoslavia's bloody breakup enfolds a family saga into an epic historical chronicle. Sudetic is a former New York Times correspondent, a Croatian-American now living in Belgrade. His Serb wife is related to the Celiks, a Muslim family who narrowly escaped death as refugees in Srebrenica in 1995, when Bosnian Serbs overran a U.N. ""safe area"" and decimated and expelled the town's Muslim-majority population. Tracing the Celiks' history over five generations, Sudetic illumines the inner workings of Tito's police state, charting the family's survival through the German invasion of Yugoslavia and under Communist rule. He brings history into the present when Serbia's president Slobodan Milosevic, ""the prime mover in Yugoslavia's slide into chaos,"" precipitated a war--with the aid of his accomplice, Croatian president Franjo Tudjman--by seizing Muslim territory. The war, according to Sudetic, was basically a landgrab by Milosevic, but was cleverly presented to the West as an age-old ethnic conflict or a struggle between Christianity and Islam. Shocking in its graphic account of atrocities committed by all sides, Sudetic's unsettling narrative gives human dimensions to a historical tragedy. Photos. (July)