From Library Journal
There are two voices in this complex and moving pictorial narrative: one is that of Harris the reporter; the other is of the people of the former Yugoslavia in their tragedy, as depicted through these arresting, consciousness-raising pictures. Inevitably, these voices are connected to and ultimately converge in a genocide grounded in issues of culture, religion, blind nationalism, and identity. Yet these issues, so much a part of Harris's book, are not central. The triumph here is that the human spirit ultimately transcends them. The force of human will and the unshakable insistence that the species will survive is really what matters. While the savagery of the orchestrated chaos of ethnic cleansing is depicted, the photographs show a people who retain their collective self-esteem. Harris clearly favors a humanist position in which the words never again take a very special and urgent meaning. Highly recommended for all social science collections.
John Xanthopoulos, Florida Alantic Univ., Boca Raton
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
John Xanthopoulos, Florida Alantic Univ., Boca Raton
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Harris has worked in the former Yugoslavia for 10 years, sending award-winning reports and photographs to British, German, and Chilean publications since the wars began, producing the book that was the basis for BBC-TV's first documentary on Bosnia, Somebody Else's War. Here his photographs stress the resilience of the people of this scoured land; the pain and confusion in their eyes--and the incredible physical destruction of homes and villages--tell a nation's story as eloquently as gore and graves. His words are powerful, too, attacking the West's "too little too late" policies, insisting Western leaders knew about concentration camps and mass graves long before CNN showed them, and describing major U.S. involvement in the late 1995 Croat-Muslim offensive. With a foreword by Kemal Kurspahic, former editor of the Bosnian daily Oslobodjenje, contrasting politicians' lack of leadership with journalists' courage, and an introduction by David Rieff, author of Slaughterhouse , which labels the West's refusal to help this war's victims "a moral death sentence on our own societies," Harris' penetrating Cry Bosnia is strong stuff, likely to be controversial. Mary Carroll
