Customer Reviews

Echoes of Violence: Letters from a War Reporter (Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Although Carolin Emcke's compelling new book is subtitled "Letters from a War Reporter," she fits none of the stereotypes that the rubric of war reporter suggests. Nowhere in her writing does the reader find the cynical, hard-bitten media professional who -- writing on short deadlines for a largely uninformed audience -- has little interest in exploring complexity or challenging the conventional wisdom.

Emcke's letters, written first for her friends and later compiled for publication, give the back story that is left out of most international news reporting. Reading them, one sees a thoughtful but utterly human person at work -- not an omniscient narrator, but someone with emotions, opinions, subjectivity, and humor. Emcke describes herself as a witness, and some of the most compelling passages in the book reveal her grappling with the difficulty of being a faithful witness to situations that are in some sense indescribable.

Emcke has an eye for the telling detail. Describing a hotel in Prishtina, Kosovo, for example, she notes on a visit in 2000 that "the porn magazine in the desk drawer offers 'phone sex with mature women' in a country with no functioning telephone lines." (A few years later human rights observers documented the role of NATO troops and UN police in encouraging the rapid growth of sex-trafficking and forced prostitution in Kosovo.)

Unlike reporters who cover local or national beats -- who can assume that their readership shares a history and culture with the people described, or is at least familiar with that history and culture -- journalists covering foreign crises have to do more than report the facts: they have to translate between worlds. Emcke's moving book shows that this role of translator requires sensitivity, empathy, and understanding, qualities she has in abundance.

From time to time Echoes of Violence is a very interesting book, and when it's at its best the reader will have an extremely difficult time trying not to keep on reading forever and ever.

But alas, this only happens on a few occasions. And that's too bad, because there is no reason whatsoever to think that Carolin Emcke comes even close to being a bad writer. A German journalist with a thorough experience in doing war journalism, Emcke has spent much of her professional career in different war zones all around the world, and she writes in a style that's actually both emotional and clear-sighted at the same time. Not only that, she also offers such detailed background analyses that it never becomes necessary for the reader to have any deeper knowledge about the area she's in or the events leading up the particular conflict (though it's obviously not a disadvantage if the reader indeed does have this knowledge).

Most important of all, though, is the simple fact that she never loses touch with the human aspects of her story.

And that's not much of a surprise, really. After all, it's this humaneness that permeates the entire book and prompted her to start putting the stories into words, since the book is based on letters she began writing to some of her closest friends after visiting Kosovo in 1999 and becoming a witness to the horrendous suffering caused by all the sickening ethnic cleansing. In order to come to terms with what she's seen she decided to put it all into words, and Echoes of Violence is the end result.

However, just because it happens to be quite a touching testimony detailing the stupidity of mankind doesn't mean it's a brilliant book. Simple because it contains too few highly detailed descriptions of war, misery, suffering and revolting battle scenes. Perhaps this criticism sounds creepy, but the thing is, without such gory descriptions it's impossible to get some sort of understanding of all the awful scenarios that Emcke finds herself in. Some of the chapters are in fact quite boring.

Still, this doesn't mean it's not worth taking a closer look at. After all, when it's good it's REALLY good.