Love Thy Neighbor: A Story Of War
By: Peter Maas / Narrated By: George Guidall
Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
Unflinching. Period.
If you want to learn more about the genocide in Bosnia but aren’t prepared for the violence and unrelenting brutality of My War Gone By, I Miss It So, please give Love Thy Neighbor a try.
Make no mistake, it’s plenty graphic. Maas himself says that, after a period of mind-numbing time, it all gets to feel like just so much war-porn. But it’s an honest and open look at many things that happened. He even crosses the lines to see what a Serbian sniper sees, how the sniper gleefully picks off targets, one bloody death at a time.
Maas really wanted to see how and why a person could says hello to a Muslim friend one day, and shoot him, rape his wife, the next. And while he interviews a great many people, I never got the feeling that he found a sufficient answer. There were justifications galore, but they all wind up sounding just so obscene. Even sadder were the cases where a neighbor could be sweeping glass from his sidewalk, weeping about days gone by, Muslim friends now dead and buried in mass graves but doing nothing about it.
I never felt beaten over the head by the endless violence and tragedy, but the other members of my audiobook club did; they became sick of the ceaseless recitations of yet another crazed and horrific mishap. Perhaps you might as well, but I hope you give the audiobook a listen. After all, George Guidall is a superb narrator, so there’s that going for it. He narrates episodes with shock, with disbelief, there’s even a certain sneer in his voice as he relates Maas in the opening weeks of the genocide, when things are simply too unbelievable to accept.
And keep in mind that we did nothing at the time. Muslims were so desperate that they begged the United States to bomb their own cities and end the misery.
Seriously, unflinching.
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