Product Description: A landmark work of New Journalism is now available in softcover.
Safe Area Gorazde is Joe Sacco's 240-page opus about the war in the former Yugoslavia. Sacco spent four months in Bosnia in 1995-1996, immersing himself in the human side of life during wartime, researching stories rarely found in conventional news coverage. The book focuses on the Muslim enclave of Gorazde, which was besieged by Bosnian Serbs during the war. Sacco spent four weeks in Gorazde, entering before the Muslims trapped inside had access to the outside world, electricity or running water.
The hardcover edition of Safe Area Gorazde put Sacco on the map as one of the pre-eminent journalists of his time, and the softcover edition will present his work to a wider audience. The book has been prominently featured in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Time, Utne Reader, Spin, The London Times, The Washington Post, Brill's Content, several NPR programs, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly, and other media. The book also led to Sacco being named a recipient of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship. Safe Area Gorazde features an introduction by Christopher Hitchens, political columnist for The Nation and Vanity Fair.
Amazing book This book is amazing. Sacco's a talented artist/journalist/storyteller/traveler with a clear voice. The book has a compelling combination of humor and horror, historical facts and personal experience. Sacco doesn't pretend to be unbiased or to remove himself from the story. His narration is honest and compelling. It's not emotionally an easy read, but I had no problem moving through this text quickly.
Just as good as his 'Palestine' Politically sharp, an eye for the human side of modern day war zones, heart warming and breathtaking: Safe Area Gorazde is a must read. Sacco's other work 'Palestine' is also an absolute must read. Both very good journalistic accounts of real existing people in real existing desperate circumstances, and in the form of graphic novels. Giving you images of the conflicts you could only better experience if you would have been there with Sacco. Fantastic. If you are not a frequent comic book reader yet: start with 'Safe Area Gorazde' or 'Palestine'!
Fascinating & Horrific An excellent account from the war in Bosnia. Well-written, well-drawn, informative & heart-breaking. Hearing 30 second blurbs on the news about things like this can be easy to ignore (or miss entirely). Reading a book like this & through it getting to know people like yourself & your friends who survived (or didn't) hellish years is harder to forget.
Most insightful book on everyday life during the Bosnian War yet I teach Central European political geography at the University of Minnesota. I just read this book, and I have to say that it better evokes the true state of chaos and genocide that was occurring in Bosnia than almost any other book on the subject. It is basically a reporter's diary... filled with eyewitness accounts of unbelievable atrocities and hatred. The key thing that this adds, and that other accounts lack, are the images. The fact that it is a cartoon does not dumb down the atrocities but adds an element of suspense and terror that written narratives like Peter Maass's "Love Thy Neighbor" largely lack, i.e., you can see the family dodging bullets and jumping in the river. Also, unlike a lot of war journalism, Joe Sacco doesn't dwell on himself and other reporters much at all -- it is focused on the people that survived genocide. With Karadzic's arrest this past week, there is no better time to read this book and remember exactly why he will be found guilty of the most heinous crimes in Europe since Stalin was in power.
Grim and terribly depressing, but important and well told First, the bad news: "Safe Area Goradze" is bleak, depressing and unrelentingly sad. It is the true tale of the horrible suffering of the Muslim population of the ever-so-ironically designated "Safe Area" of Goradze, a city in the former country of Yugoslavia during that nation's recent civil war and breakup. The combination of the author's drawings and prose work together to tell the gruesome story of a real life hell on Earth in brutal, unflinching, unblinking detail. It's the graphic novel equivalent of "Schindler's List". If you buy this book, steel yourself. It's not an easy read.
Nevertheless, I think Joe Sacco is a genius who is to be commended for telling a story that cries out to be told. I'm sure his editors warned him that this story was not one that would be a big seller. The arcane politics of the former Yugoslavia, which Sacco does a masterful job of explaining, don't interest many people. And the subject matter is depressing and gruesome in the extreme. Nevertheless, he wrote and illustrated the graphic novel, and Fantagraphics Books is to be applauded for publishing it. Hopefully, this work will serve as the historical record of the awful torments inflicted upon human beings in a particular time and place, leaving wounds physical and psychic that will take generations to heal.
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