Beyond the Mountains of the Damned - by Matthew McAllester (Paperback)

About the Book

A journalist examines the war in Kosovo.PW Best Book of the Year - Nonfiction, 2002

Book Synopsis

Winner, Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2002, Non-Fiction

The story of Pec--Kosovo's most destroyed city during the wars in Serbia

For every survivor of a crime, there is a criminal who forces his way into the victim's thoughts long after 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 men--one 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.

Review Quotes

"A heart-rending tale of the execution of innocents, told with eloquence and compassion by a brilliant and courageous young journalist. What is astonishing about this story of death in Pec is that it actually took place in the last year of the twentieth century and in supposedly civilized Europe. Through the life of Isa the butcher, Matt McAllester graphically depicts the precariousness of life in Kosovo under Slobodan Milosevic, and the compromises and indignities imposed upon anyone who through the accident of birth had an Albanian ethnic identity. What makes this a path-breaking account is the author's drive to find the sadistic killers who shot children in cold blood, and his insistence that they explain their crime. The story is unforgettable."--Roy Gutman, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of A Witness to Genocide, Newsweek diplomatic correspondent

"Beyond the Mountains of the Damned is about how war destroys society at its most basic level. I read this and understood what happened to ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances during those dark and desperate days in Kosovo. It is a book I will not forget."--Janine di Giovanni, special correspondent, Vanity Fair and the Times of London

"Matthew McAllester's Beyond the Mountains of the Damned tells the searing and disturbing story of the war in Kosovo. He explains clearly, as few have, what happened and why, and why it matters. His powerful narrative takes us down roads, past checkpoints, and into battle zones, and it plunges us into strange, sad, scarred places where no other reporter has gone. The book has a drive and a momentum that keep you reading even when the sheer horror and stupidity of events is painful. A human as well as a historic tale, told with an eye and an ear for the personal, the individual, the intimate."--Amy Wilentz, author of Martyrs Crossing and The Rainy Season: Haiti since Duvalier

"To write this book, Matt McAllester walked through mountains covered with snow and hatred with rifle shots aimed at him from above. He wrote it with extraordinary talent that is equal to his bravery."--Jimmy Breslin