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.
Sacco's Images Are as Richly Detailed as His Text ^ Joe Sacco is an engaging and direct writer, and an incredibly detailed black-and-white cartoonist, but above all, he is a good journalist. Comics just happen to be the outlet for his reportage.
Sacco has published cartoons since the 1980s, but Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995 marked his first graphic novel when it was released in 2000, followed quickly by the collected graphic novel publication of Palestine in 2001. Though Sacco is probably better known for his work in the award-winning Palestine (originally published as nine smaller books in 1996), Safe Area is arguably the better of the two, earned Sacco the Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel in 2001, and cemented his role as a master of the unique medium of comics journalism.
Safe Area documents Sacco's four trips in late 1995 and early 1996 to Gorazde (pronounced "go-RAJH-duh," as the author explains), a United Nations-designated safe area in eastern Bosnia. Its Muslim population suffered many losses during the Bosnian War--both in lives and an incredible amount of property destroyed--but the town was the only one in eastern Bosnia to hold out while the Bosnian Serb forces carried out an "ethnic cleansing" of the region.
Sacco documents the siege imposed upon Garozde's population by the Serb forces and its impact on the town's people in 227 pages of journalism at its finest. His recognizable black-and-white visuals include a portrayal of himself, but unlike the tendency of Art Spiegelman to become the center of attention in his tales, Sacco keeps the focus on his subjects. He seems only to portray himself for the purpose of transparency of the journalistic process, ultimately even exposing some personal flaws and unavoidable conflicts that go along with being an American embedded in another country for the purposes of a story.
In one scene, Sacco recounts reviewing gruesome home footage of a Serb shelling before having the Gorazde resident who taped it name an "outrageous" price for the video. Sacco also points out that as an American journalist he receives passage in and out of Gorazde via U.N. escort, but his subjects--such as Edin, a graduate student who takes Sacco into his home and provides much of the graphic novel's stories--did not have that luxury. Sacco also takes requests for American-made jeans and films when he leaves town, and occasionally gets overburdened by his task or certain individuals. And though he does find the need to editorialize at times, it is kept to a minimum.
The honesty lends credibility to his effort and makes the stories incredibly personable, which is Sacco's entire goal with Safe Area. The book is not a documentation of the general events from a broad prospective; the news at large already had that covered. It is instead an account of how those major events affected real people--what they felt like on the other side of the world. Though Sacco provides a well-researched outline of the events to keep everything in perspective, Safe Area primarily relies on snapshot stories to convey its messages, and offers things like Bill Clinton's statements during the war through the eyes of Muslims.
Sacco's images are as richly detailed as his text. Every person in every panel looks like a unique individual, and Sacco accurately documents everything from the clothes they wear to their posture to the way they speak. The art is slightly less caricatured than that of Palestine and better for it. Sacco's images are still just a bit larger than life and carry with them a liveliness and convincing realism few journalists have captured.
-- William Jones
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.
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