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4.31 AVERAGE
4.31 AVERAGE
Of all of Sacco's work this one hit me the hardest. I remember watching all of this reported by Peter Jennings, in my living room with my mother. I'm not sure why I had a hard time following/understanding the dynamics of the other conflicts he covered, but this one was so straight forward and tragic.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
fast-paced
I'm so grateful for the empathy that this book has reinforced in me for war survivors. While the political conflict that lead to this war is less one-sided than this book portrays, this book does an amazing job of putting you on the ground and showing you the physical devestation that war brings upon innocent people. My prayers are with everyone who experienced this conflict, as well as those in Ukraine.
Safe Area Gorazde is a stunning work, combining the best traits of journalism, comics, and historical non-fiction. What really makes this book exceptional is the fact that Joe Sacco has mastered all of the elements of his craft - the writing and the art hold up equally well despite the high standards that Sacco has evidently set for himself.[return][return]The tale told herein is alternately thrilling, horrifying, and redeeming, but manages to hit all of those high points without an excess of authorial intervention. Sacco lets the incredible story carry us along with little overt preaching or moralizing. This is not easy to do with material that relates such a powerful tale of the worst shortcomings of the human race.[return][return]I think that until I read Safe Area Gorazde, I didn't really grasp just what the hell had gone wrong in Bosnia in the early nineties. This book cleared a lot of things up for me, and did so with an incredibly compelling narrative and graphic style.
challenging
informative
sad
medium-paced
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
http://nhw.livejournal.com/520565.html[return][return]Sacco has a superb portrait here of a community under siege, not actually sure if there is a future, yet alone what it might hold (there were persistent rumours that Gora~de might be traded to the Serbs in return for concessions elsewhere). He shows himself as an outsider, both slightly sinister (with his eyes never visible behind his glasses) and slightly absurd (with his lips grotesquely enlarged, giving him literally a big mouth). The inhabitants of Gora~de, and their assailants, are shown as normal human beings, caught up in scenes of horror and destruction.[return][return]As well as providing a narrative of the people of Gora~de, Sacco uses the book to make a couple of factual assertions that I have not seen anywhere else in writing about the war. One is that chemical weapons were used by the Serbs against refugees fleeing Srebrenica. He is completely convinced of this, although he concedes that Human Rights Watch, who also looked into the question, were not. I can add a little more supporting, though circumstantial, evidence from our report on Yugoslav arms sales to Iraq published in late 2002: it is a matter of record that the old Yugoslav army had a chemical weapons stockpile in the Sarajevo suburb of Had~ii, and that nobody (at least three years ago) seemed to know precisely what had happened to the stockpile after the army withdrew from Sarajevo in 1992. Quite likely most of it did reach military depots in Serbia, but it is far from impossible that some was diverted into Bosnian Serb hands en route, or subsequently.[return][return]Sacco's second factual point is linked to the notorious assertion by General Sir Michael Rose, at the time in charge of British peace-keepers, that a tank attack on the town could have been stopped by "one bloke with a crowbar" and that the defenders of Gora~de were asking UN peacekeepers to do their fighting for them. Sacco's depiction of the tank attack on a terrified and poorly armed civilian population is a far more eloquent refutation of Rose's statement than could possibly have been achieved by the written word alone.[return][return]Perhaps few people these days will be very interested in the politics and history of Gora~de. It is after all ten years after the Dayton negotiations which ended the Bosnian war. The debate about the rights and wrongs of international intervention is now, alas, completely different from the period when President Clinton and the rest of the international community displayed utter spinelessness in the face of warlordism and genocide in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia, before finally doing the right thing in Kosovo.[return][return]But the book remains very much worth reading as a human story of how people do survive in extreme circumstances, and ought to be celebrated as a classic of its genre.
A tremendous achievement in journalistic storytelling and an excellent tool for educating oneself about the forgotten war in the Balkans that despicably claimed so many innocent lives (while the rest of the world watched) during the 1990's.
It turns out that a graphic novel can be historically sophisticated and gripping at the same time. Superb.
This graphic novel has better explained the origins and start of the Bosnian Wars, than anything else I’ve read. But the most horrifying thing is the similarities I see happening now in U.S. politics.
Hard to read. Worth reading.
I don't usually put graphic novels up here (not that I've been reading that many of late in any case), but this one had enough text, I thought, to justify it. I am desperately ignorant of some world events - I guess most of us are, to some degree or another - but without something like this, it's hard to feel like you can get any kind of grasp of something that happened in the world without devoting months to it.
I don't usually put graphic novels up here (not that I've been reading that many of late in any case), but this one had enough text, I thought, to justify it. I am desperately ignorant of some world events - I guess most of us are, to some degree or another - but without something like this, it's hard to feel like you can get any kind of grasp of something that happened in the world without devoting months to it.