The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living [Hardcover]

Courtney Angela Brkic (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 4, 2004

When she was twenty-three years old, Courtney Angela Brkic joined a UN-contracted forensic team in eastern Bosnia. Unlike many aid workers, Brkic was drawn there by her family history, and although fluent in the language, she was advised to avoid letting local workers discover her ethnicity. Brkic helped set up a morgue in Tuzla, assisting pathologists with autopsies and laying out personal effects for photographing. Later, she helped excavate graves at Srebenica, where many thousands had been indiscriminately slaughtered.

This was not the only excavating she was doing. As she describes the gruesome work of recovering remains and transcribing the memories of survivors, she also explores her family's history in Yugoslavia, telling of her grandmother's childhood in Herzegovina, early widowhood, and imprisonment during World War II for hiding her Jewish lover. The Stone Fields, deeply personal and wise, asks what it takes to prevent the violent loss of life, and what we are willing to risk in the process.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This heartbreaking memoir wends between Brkic's years in war-ravaged Bosnia (1993, 1996–1997), first interviewing refugees and then excavating mass graves outside Srebrenica, where 7,000 Muslim males were slaughtered, and including her family's history in Bosnia-Herzegovina surrounding WWII. Brkic, an archeologist, was 21 when she first began working in Bosnia with the UN International War Crimes Tribunal, and 24 during her second foray, with Physicians for Human Rights. A first-generation American of Croatian descent, she returns to Bosnia, invoking what, postwar, is only memory: the land of idyllic childhood summers where she remembers her aunt's catfish swimming in a tub and the taste of lamb fed on chamomile leaves in a countryside now littered with land mines. In the former garment factory, now morgue, outside Tuzla, where she works, Brkic feels alien to the other human rights workers; her ties to the region superimpose the face of her brother on the newly dead; her assertion that not everyone bears equivalent guilt for the war causes her to angrily demand that Serb workers not excavate the mass graves she believes they had a hand in filling. Whiting Award winner Brkic's haunting, hopeless memoir is an agonizing treatise on the awful cost of war and its long, pain-stoked aftermath in which, as she records it, those outside forget and those inside can barely continue living. Photos, maps.
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From Booklist

Brkic galvanized readers with her first book, Stillness (2003), a Whiting Award-winning short story collection inspired by her unnerving work as a forensic archaeologist in war-torn Bosnia. She now presents an equally commanding memoir in which she chronicles her psychically demanding and dangerous work as part of a UN-directed effort to identify the remains of the massacred innocents of Srebrenica, and unearths the astonishing story of her paternal grandmother, a Croatian Catholic from Herzegovina. Orphaned at 14, then widowed young and left with two sons, Adelka flees the poverty of her village for Sarajevo, only to put her and her sons' lives in jeopardy by falling in love with, and hiding, a Jew during the Nazi occupation. The overlay of intimate tales from two demonically violent times makes for a highly dramatic work, and Brkic's emotional frankness, gift for vivid portraiture, ability to write about the dead with elegiac grace and scientific precision, and deep compassion for the victims of genocide create a riveting and thought-provoking reflection on humankind's barbarity and heroism. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (August 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374207747
• ISBN-13: 978-0374207748
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,327,152 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An insightful if sorrowful reading experience, September 17, 2004

By 

Dick Lavine. (Bethesda, MD USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living (Hardcover)

"The Stone Fields" places a human face on the dry remnants of the slaughter that occurred in Bosnia-Herzogovina in the nineties. Ms. Brkic not only knows where the bodies are buried; she has the talent to make the reader perceive them as people. The reader sees and feels the author's own engagement with the remnants of these victims as she goes about her work as a member of the forensic team, excavating bodies, assisting pathologists in conducting autopsies, and arranging personal effects for photographing.

But she doesn't stop there. In a rarely accomplished feat of courage and candor, Ms. Brkic integrates her own relationships with her father, who was born in Croatia, her mother and brother, and with her aunts who are still living in Zagreb. An especially poignant part of the book describes the love that was not to last between Ms. Brkic and a young disturbed soldier from "the edge" of Herzegovina.

Perhaps the most arresting and exhilarating and hearbreaking part of the story is the deep, abiding affection between Ms. Brkic's Catholic grandmother, Andelka, and her Jewish lover, Joseph, who died in a Nazi concentration camp.

This book reminds us that the most precious human qualities, like loyalty and compassion and love, exist in the midst of genocide and in its aftermath.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Exquisite Memoir--Alan M. Rochlin, Bethesda, Maryland, December 17, 2004

By 

Alan M. Rochlin - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living (Hardcover)

In this beautifully written memoir Courtney Brkic describes her work as a forensic anthropologist in Bosnia in the days following the massacre of thousands in the recent war. It is her mission to bear witness-to give faces and voices to the innocent victims of ethnic strife. She does so with anger and compassion, in prose that is luminous and haunting.

In counterpoint to the tragic events of recent years Brkic presents a lyrical reminiscence in the chronicle of her Croatian father's extraordinary family, played against the region's tragic history.

A must-read, this book is the work of a gifted writer and poet, and it succeeds on many levels. It is a daughter's tribute to her family, an author's plea for justice in the wake of unspeakable events, and a transcendent work of art.

5 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An informative book that lacks direction, September 9, 2004

By 

David Tinker (Baltimore) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living (Hardcover)

I found the book informative but a bit meandering. Other than describing the sensations of working at a mass grave there was not real informative science or political explaination on what she was doing. I would also liked to have seen more back ground regarding the Serb, Croat and Bosnian conflict. It is explained that Serbs are responsible for mass murder in the last few years but was less forthcoming about the Croation facists that worked with the Nazis to exterminate the Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. Although alluded to, it is not clear. I also thought the flashbacks were poorly integrated and did little add to the story line.