Winner, "Publishers Weekly" Best Books of 2002, Non-Fiction
"In badly constructed books, the reader doesn't care what
happens on the next page. In well-constructed books, the reader
can't wait to see what happens on the next page. This book is a
rare, third kind: The reader dreads what will happen on the next
page. Nevertheless, he feels compelled to read on. . . . McAllester
takes the reader not only along the streets where atrocities have
been committed but inside homes while they are happening. As is the
case with many good reads, the power of such scenes comes from the
order in which events are presented. First the author develops a
character, then later in the book informs you about his fate. Or
the author will describe how a family is brutalized, then
describes, almost as an aside -- in the course of a succeeding
chapter about his own adventures in war-torn Kosovo -- how he meets
a traumatized eyewitness to the previous account. In this way, the
reader becomes an observer not only of what was happening inside
Kosovo during the NATO bombardment but of what was happening to
McAllester himself and how he managed to assemble his book."
--"Washington Post"
"The power of McAllester's extraordinary book lies not in its
comprehensiveness or its literary polish-though there are many
brilliantly moving and perceptive passages-but in its shocking
authenticity and deep moral concern. One gets the sense that he
risked his life not simply to pursue a story, timely and important
as it was, but because of the enormity of the evil being done and
his conviction that, in a world of bland policy abstractions, what
happened in those days inside Kosovo had to be told."
--"New Leader"
"McAllester powerfully concludes that a sickening mixture of
greed, ethnic hostility, and wartime nihilism has displaced the
healing power for love and reconciliation for the forseeable
future. One of the most thoughtful accounts of the conflict in
Kosovo to date conveyed with taut journalistic clarity that should
ensure the book a broad range of readers."
--"Kirkus, Starred Review"
"This account is not of the avirtual wara that Westerners saw on
their television screens but of the real effects on people who
consider the ravaged area home."
--"Library Journal, Starred Review"
"McAllester's spare, understated prose is potent as is his
exploration of the human side of geopolitics and war."
--"Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"
"In a twist that took McAllester as much by surprise as it will
the reader, it appears that Isa Bala lived in that ill-defined
world too, a world where people make deals and concessions just to
survive another day. Perhaps he believed that through such
compromises, his family would be safe. if so, he was tragically
wrong."
--"Sunday Telegraph (London)"
"Beyond the Mountains of the Damned is a gripping, if
depressing, account of what McAllester found among the ruins. . . .
There is no bravado. . . . He offers vivid thumbnail sketches of
Kosovar warriors in the field."
-- "Newsday"
"McAllester offers us the kind of specific detail that we need
to make other people's lives human to us. Even more importantly, he
tells us how it is to be the oppressor, or at least one of the
minions of the oppressors"
--"American Book Review"
For every survivor of a crime, there is a criminal who forces
his way into the victim's thoughts longafter the act has been
committed.
Reporters weren't allowed into Kosovo during the war without the
permission of the Yugoslavian government but Matthew McAllester
went anyway. In Beyond the Mountains of the Damned he tells the
story of Pec, Kosovo's most destroyed city and the site of the
earliest and worst atrocities of the war, through the lives of two
menone Serb and one Kosovar. They had known each other, and been
neighbors for years before one visited tragedy on the other. With a
journalist's eye for detail McAllester asks the great question of
war: What kind of men could devastate an entire city, killing whole
families, and feel no sense of guilt? The answer lies in the
culture of gangsterism and ethnic hatred that began with the
collapse of Yugoslavia.
In March of 1999, the world watched thousands of Albanian
refugees pour out of Kosovo, carrying stories of the terror that
drove them from their homes. To Isa Bala and his family, Albanian
Muslims who stayed in Pec during the NATO bombardment, the war in
Kosovo was not about cruise missiles and geopolitics. It was about
tiptoeing between survival and death in the town that saw the
fiercest destruction, the most thorough eviction of the Albanian
population and killings whose brutality demands explanation. To
Nebojsa Minic and other Serb militiamen who ruled with murder, the
conflict was about the exercise of power. Today they are alive and
well in the new Yugoslavia. So unconcerned are they over the
prospect of ever being held accountable for their crimes that they
were willing to sit down over coffee after the war and discuss in
detail their brief, brutal reign.
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