Jennifer Szalai

@jenszalai

Nonfiction book critic at The New York Times

Vrijeme pridruživanja: ožujak 2011.

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  1. 23. sij

    As I say in the review, Karadzic weaponized history and identity to stoke hatred and turn the people who listened to him into killers. Stern wants the truth to be more complicated and less banal than it is. I recommend reading the work of and instead. 12/12

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  2. 23. sij

    ... it would have taken an exceptional feat of writing to have prevented a convicted war criminal like Karadzic from commandeering her narrative. Empathy is woefully insufficient when it comes to writing a book like this — and it can even lead the writer astray. 11/x

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  3. 23. sij

    Karadzic is revered by violent white nationalists across the world; the Christchurch shooter in NZ and Utoya shooter in Norway both cite Karadzic as a model. Stern says it wasn't her intention to lend credence to their views (and she's alarmed Trump won in 2016), but ... 10/x

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  4. 23. sij

    “Mixing of cultures to create new hybrids does entail loss. Grave loss.” That's not Karadzic speaking; it's Stern. She follows it up with some junk by a *white nationalist* saying that “‘white European culture’ could indeed be eclipsed due to immigration and cultural mixing.” 9/x

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  5. 23. sij

    But what's I found most disturbing about the book is how she entertains Karadzic's grotesque excuses for his campaign of extermination. His "fear of being eclipsed," she writes, was "based on a kernel of truth." 8/x

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  6. 23. sij

    ... she's in trouble. So she strains for profundity by embroidering her book with literary affectations, starting with the title. A list of people at the beginning of her book is labeled "Dramatis Personae." Her meditations are presented in melodramatic italics, etc. 7/x

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  7. 23. sij

    Stern says Karadzic wasn't responding to a real threat, but she seems to buy what he says about *perceiving* a threat. Her interviewing method is "to surrender to his idea of himself." And when the self-pitying war criminal's "idea of himself" is that of a nationalist hero... 6/x

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  8. 23. sij

    But what Karadzic has to tell her is the usual odious stuff he's been spewing for years, about "protecting" his people. Karadzic was found guilty for multiple crimes against humanity, including the massacre at Srebrenica, where Serbian forces murdered 8,000 men and boys. 5/x

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  9. 23. sij

    Access like this can be a devil's bargain. Stern even admits as much: When she accidentally challenged him in an interview (and it wasn't really a challenge!) she was so worried that he would kick her out and make it harder for her to finish her book. 4/x

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  10. 23. sij

    ... she gained access to someone who was then standing trial for war crimes at an international tribunal (interviews began in 2014; Karadzic was convicted in 2016) — the kind of access unheard of since the psychiatrists evaluated the Nazis at Nuremberg. 3/x

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  11. 23. sij

    To write a book about a perpetrator of genocide requires extraordinary moral fortitude *and* extraordinary writing skills. I don't think Stern wrote this book out of malevolence, or because she's a Karadzic sympathizer. After Op-Ed published an excerpt, she apologized. But... 2/x

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  12. 23. sij

    I reviewed "My War Criminal," by Jessica Stern, a book that recounts her 12 interviews with Radovan Karadzic. Stern's book is an abject failure, and I wanted to add a few words, because the moral quandaries raised by a book like this are enormous 1/x

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  13. 21. sij

    Before reading Kyle Chayka's new book, I hadn't considered how sleek lifestyle minimalism encourages a retreat from the world, while Minimalist art can encourage a deeper engagement with it

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  14. 8. sij

    I learned a lot from Marcia Chatelain's important new book about McDonald's, fast food, black capitalism and the civil rights movement

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  15. 3. sij

    “I’d like to get hold of that Scorsese and choke him like a chicken. And then after I get through with him, I’d grab that other pipsqueak, the guy who played the Irishman.”

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  16. proslijedio/la je Tweet
    3. sij

    New Interview: I talked to Vali Nasr about Suleimani’s role in the Middle East, his dealings with world leaders & place within the Iranian regime, and what might come next.

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  17. 31. pro 2019.

    My last review of 2019/first review of 2020 is of "Uncanny Valley," by Anna Wiener, a tech memoir like no other

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  18. 31. pro 2019.
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  19. 30. pro 2019.

    Autocorrect's persistent attempts to change "hellscape" to "hells cape" is one sign that technology hasn't kept up with the world it has created

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  20. proslijedio/la je Tweet
    19. pro 2019.

    Reviewing books by Fintan O'Toole and Rich Lowry in one piece is a bit like reviewing the Vienna Philharmonic alongside a performance by the Nails-On-Chalkboard Symphony, but this is quite good

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