Customer Reviews

When History Is a Nightmare : Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina

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Weine's book is by no means narrow in its subject-matter. He touches on: inter-ethnic marriage, criticisms of the United Nations, memory as a ground for social morality, the challenges of refugees in America, the construction of psychoses, the social deification of doctors, urbanism, the identity of Europe and the Balkans, the impact of communist cultural censorship, fundamentalism, the social responsibilities of psychiatrists, the need for a permanent UN war crimes court, and discontinuities in the lifepaths of trauma survivors. Any one of these issues could have been the topic for his relatively short 230 page book. But together, they paint a picture of the multifaceted chaos that is ethnic conflict. We get the sense that nothing here is simple, that everything is interconnected, and that the ethnic cleansing is not a psychiatric, geographic, military, or political issue, but fundamentally a human problem of persons.

So if you are looking for a deep and careful study of the psychological issues that afflict ethnic cleansing survivors, then I suppose that this book is not your source. If you want, on the other hand, a compelling and touching tour through a recent crisis of human history and a casual chat with a knowledgeable, connected, and compassionate person,then Stevan Weine's book is the perfect choice...END