From Library Journal
This is an important and powerful book for establishing the historical record of the recent savage events in Bosnia. Gutman was among the first Western journalists to visit the "death camps" where Serbs tortured, raped, and slaughtered their prisoners--an act of deliberate policy, as the reports make clear. Gutman's reporting has won numerous awards, including the Pulitizer Prize and the George Polk Award, and this volume of his original dispatches from Newsday shows why. To some extent, there is nothing "new" here, but there is immense value in having these reports gathered together. What is the effect? Guilt. Shame. A sense that these events are truly reminiscent of the Nazi era--and the cowardice of the Neville Chamberlain period. As we contemplate both America's place in the post-Cold War world and Western moral strength, Gutman's book should head our list of essential reading.
- Henry Steck, SUNY-Cortland
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Gutman presents the Pulitzer Prize-winning releases that he wrote, between December 1991 and June_ 1993, describing in detail the violence of nationalist Serbs, the deportation of Muslims, the systematic rape, and other horrors from the battlefields of Bosnia. As a collection, these dispatches make difficult reading; they are repetitive and horrible, forcing cover-to-cover readers to inure themselves to the impact of the violence. What is valuable is the existence of these testimonies as an anecdotal historical record. Gutman begins with a long (30-some pages) author's note, in which he writes of the stories his conscience forced him to investigate, analyzes the historical role of world affairs and Yugoslavian domestic events in the present crisis, and criticizes world--pointedly, U.S.--response to the realities of this war. For the value of his too-short analysis and the historical value of the dispatches themselves, A Witness to Genocide belongs in libraries. Angus Trimnell