War's End: Profiles From Bosnia 1995-1996 [Hardcover]

Joe Sacco (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 16, 2005

War cartoonist Joe Sacco visits the Bosnian conflict to uncover the stories that are often ignored or uncovered by traditional media.

How does an artist reconcile being forced to go to the front line of a brutal conflict that will change his life and homeland forever? What happens when a reporter finally comes face-to-face with an evil war criminal? Before his groundbreaking graphic novels Safe Area Gorazde and The Fixer, Palestinian author Joe Sacco created two short stories with characters from each side of the crossfire. Collected for the first time in War’s End: Profiles from Bosnia 1995–1996 are the acclaimed Soba and Christmas with Karadzic. In Soba, Sacco captures the internal torment of the romanticized Sarajevo artist-warrior who captivated the Western media with his guitar and hard-partying ways. In Christmas with Karadzic, Sacco gives the reader an inside peek at the darkly humorous news process that doesn’t make the headlines back home as he chases after one of the most hated and sought-after Bosnian Serb leaders and war criminals.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. These two stories by Sacco bookend his definitive works of comics journalism on the Bosnian War, The Fixer and Safe Area Gorazde. Like those books, these stories take readers with Sacco as he searches for some truth in all the conjecture and confronts his own fears and suspicions about the war. In the first story, "Christmas with Karadzic," Sacco goes to great, often uproarious lengths to get an interview with the notorious Bosnian war criminal Radovan Karadzic as the leader attends Christmas services. The story climaxes with Sacco observing Karadzic, noting, "I feel nothing intimidating about his presence, nothing extraordinary about this man indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal... a man I have despised with all my heart for years." Rather than reporting the usual facts about Karadzic, Sacco shows him at his most mundane and, consequently, most revealing. In all of his work, Sacco displays a similar knack for seeing a subject from an entirely unexpected view, as he does with the second story, "Soba." The titular character is a regular guy and wanna-be rock star who becomes a war hero to his fellow Sarajevans. His story illuminates the conditions of wartime life and gives readers a lively character to hang onto amid the destruction. This work is painstakingly drawn and reported—it is both great cartooning and moving, revealing reportage. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Sacco continues his comic-strip reportage on the Bosnian war with this collection of two shorter stories whose events predate Safe Area Gora_de (2000) and The Fixer (2003). In "Christmas with Karadzic," Sacco joins a group of hard-bitten journalists trying to score an interview with Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic, the driving force behind the siege of Sarajevo. "Soba" follows a charismatic Bosnian artist as he hits the bars to obliterate memories of his army job planting land mines. "Christmas" is a brutally honest, first-person account of an encounter with evil; but "Soba" is the stronger piece, thanks to its fascinating protagonist, whose real art is for survival. Sacco's other reports from Bosnia are more substantive, but these stories share their expressive drawing, incisive observation, and shrewd combination of jarring visual perspectives, comic exaggeration, and black humor, which so well convey the chaos of the war. Sacco's Bosnian dispatches remain potent, but his longtime fans may feel he has gone to this particular well too often, and wish he would turn to new subjects. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly; First Edition edition (June 16, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1896597920
• ISBN-13: 978-1896597928
• Product Dimensions: 10.6 x 7.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #499,737 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #75 in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Publishers > Drawn and Quarterly

More About the Author

Joe Sacco, one of the world's greatest cartoonists, is widely hailed as the creator of war reportage comics. He is the author of, among other books, Palestine, which received the American Book Award, and Safe Area: Gora�de, which won the Eisner Award and was named a New York Times notable book and Time magazine's best comic book of 2000. Hisbooks have been translated into fourteen languages and his comics reporting has appeared in Details, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Harper's and the Guardian. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another triumph for Sacco, December 17, 2007

By 

Salvatore P. Vasta - See all my reviews
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This review is from: War's End: Profiles From Bosnia 1995-1996 (Hardcover)

Anyone who has read any of Sacco's other tomes knows what you'll find with this title. Sacco manages to take you inside Bosnia by depicting himself and his struggles warts and all. It is an honest look at the war because Sacco is being honest with himself. He doesn't side with one party but simply presents life as he sees it. For a cartoonist, there can be no greater compliment.