Book Report

School started in Belgrade yesterday. I woke up to the sound of children playing at the elementary school across the street. There were long lines outside all of the stores selling school supplies last night. In high school, I was always required to show up on the first day of school with a series of essays on books that I had read over the summer. In keeping with that, here is what I read on my recent 24-hours-over-4-days on the bus.

Balkan Ghosts by Robert D. Kaplan

I was predisposed to not like this book after reading in a far superior book that is was the only book on the region that Clinton read before the NATO intervention in Kosovo. Power argued that the way the conflicts in the region were presented greatly informed Clinton’s belief that conflicts here are intractable. I refuse to believe that any conflict is intractable.

The travelogue aspects of the book are entertaining, as is the biographical sketches of the people he meets in Bulgaria and Romania, but I think the book to too reliant on analogy in its explanations of the region. True, the American audience of the book doesn’t know very much about the Balkans, but calling Kosovo ‘The Balkan West Bank,’ and the Soviet Union ‘The New Ottoman Empire’ (not to mention analogizing Athens and Beirut) is lazy and inaccurate. It made me angry; at times I had to put the book down. (I spent some time thinking about what analogies I would use – I think I would compare Kosovo with Kurdistan, but most people in the west don’t know too much about Kurdistan either, so it’s not a very useful analogy.)

The author also likes to emphasize the exoticness of the region, explicitly stating that he did not spend time in or write about Timisoara, Romania because it was too ‘Central European.’ The Balkans are unusual and interesting, but even Timisoara has aspects of the bizarre (such as ‘My Fair Lady’ in Romanian). It seems like a disservice to the region to only seek out and catalog the most foreign-to-a-western-audience aspects, but it does make for a more entertaining travelogue.

And now a book that I actually like:

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges

I read this book a few years ago & liked it, but wasn’t blown away. It’s one of K-in-Banja-Luka’s favorite books, so I thought I would try it again. Simply amazing. Hedges is a journalist who has spent most of his professional life working in war zones. He was also a student at Harvard Divinity School. He writes about the seductive nature of war, how society shifts during war time and values are inverted. He writes quite a bit about the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosova. His explanations of the start of the conflicts – ethnic divisions manipulated for political purposes and the self-interest of those in power –are much more convincing to me than Kaplan’s. (Or maybe it's what I need to believe. If the conflicts are unsolvable, why am I here?) And it’s beautifully written, like a really well-constructed sermon in which excerpts from classic literature, personal experience, and current events are woven together to deliver a powerful message:

‘to survive as a human being is possible only through love... It does not mean we will avoid war or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive. But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has power both to resist in our nature what we know we must resist and to affirm what we know we must affirm. And love, as the poets remind us, is eternal.'

And somehow he manages to make it sound much less heavy-handed than I do in my little review.