From the conflict in Bosnia, a war correspondent’s montage of images — eerie, grotesque, ironic, angry, absurd.
A Serb and Muslim, friends before the war, exchanging gossip via shortwave radio hours before they will try to kill each other. The Serbian president coolly denying reports of atrocities that have been witnessed by hundreds. A battlefield doctor performing miracles of surgery without anesthetic. Drivers without headlights gambling their lives in the darkness of no-man’s-land while schoolchildren scamper across Sniper Alley. Love Thy Neighbor ventures into the minefields of modern war. Published in 1996 by Alfred A. Knopf, Love Thy Neighbor won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for nonfiction and the Overseas Press Club Book Prize, and was a finalist for several other literary awards. Foreign editions have been published in Britain, Germany, Bosnia, South Korea and Taiwan.
Excerpts from Love Thy Neighbor
Excerpt 2: A Checkpoint Arrest
Reviews & Press
“After all of the thousands of articles and news reports written about the war in Bosnia, you might think that there was nothing more to say on this unhappy subject. Peter Maass’s angry, stinging, profanely eloquent and often painful book would prove you wrong.”
The New York Times
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“Peter Maass’s book is far from the measured and objective account one would expect from a journalist who covered the war for The Washington Post. He has written a sardonic, passionate, searching, often surreal book that, like Dispatches, finds its bitter genius in the chasm between truth and official truth and the deadly implications of this gap.”
The Washington Post
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“Maass delivers his tales in a style like a thrill ride. The words start slowly, letting the reader settle in before the velocity increases, the rush of the moment surges and the writing takes control.”
USA Today
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“A gripping work from the very first page, by a writer whose bravery, honesty and vivid proficiency add honor to his profession. There are events in this book the reader will find hard to forget. I doubt the author, having been witness, will ever forget them.”
Joseph Heller
“Like Michael Herr’s ‘Dispatches,’ this is a literary work about war that enlightens us, horrifies us and often forces us to face parts of ourselves that are unflatteringly familiar. A remarkable, brilliant book.”
Gay Talese
“Brilliantly written with contained emotion, Peter Maass’s shattering book on the tragedy in the former Yugoslavia is more than a reportage; it is a powerful plea for sanity, decency and compassion on behalf of forgotten victims.”
Elie Wiesel
“Madly honest…enthralling. This anguished, unquiet book is a worthy addition to the long literature of witness.”
Newsday
“The most important book you could possibly read about Bosnia. Maass writes with compassion and conviction.”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Immensely compelling…Love Thy Neighbor will surely stand as one of the definitive accounts of Bosnia’s descent into madness.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“With a reporter’s eye for detail and a novelist’s talent for storytelling, [Maass] has written a gripping and penetrating account of the war. His insights shatter some of our most comfortable assumptions.”
St. Petersburg Times
“His anguish and anger pour onto the page…Horribly fascinating and terribly sad.”
Dallas Morning News