Reviews
1) Al Kamen, "The Book on Kosovo," Washington Post Magazine, July 18, 1999, p.W02. During the middle of the NATO Kosovo campaign, the Clinton adminstration was under pressure to cave in and allow the Serbian secret police, military, and paramilitaries to "ethnically cleanse" Kosovo. The result of such a capitulation would have been millions of Kosovo Albanian refugees, on the borders of Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia, fighting for generations to retrieve their lands and avenge the atrocities inflicted upon them. Kamen writes of this period when the NATO air-campaign was coming under intense criticism:
"[President] Clinton's favorite Balkans book [is] A Bridge Betrayed, by Haverford College religion professor Michael Sells, which argues that the various ethnic groups actually had gotten along well for centuries. Sells, of Serbian descent, writes that strife in the Balkans can be blamed, not on historic enmity but on more recent anti-Muslim Serbian nationalist rantings. Clinton apparently liked this book so much that he sent it around to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Defense Secretary William Cohen, national security adviser Sandy Berger and Joint Chiefs Chairman Henry Hugh Shelton as required reading."
2) Review of The Bridge Betrayed by Adrian Hastings. First appeared in The Heythrop Journal in January 1998; reprinted in - Books on Bosnia: A Critical Bibliography of Works Relating to Bosnia-Herzegovina Published since 1990 in West European Languages. Ed. Quintin Hoare & Noel Malcolm (London: The Bosnian Institute, 1999). ISBN: 1901029034; also available on the web at http://www.bosnia.org.uk.
3) Bjorn Krondorfer, Review of The Bridge Betrayed in Z Magazine (Oct.1998)..Bjorn Krondorfer is assistant professor of Religious Studies at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Among his books is Remembrance and Reconciliation: Encounters Between Young Jews and Germans (Yale UP, 1995).
4) Review of The Bridge Betrayed, by John S. Conway, Association of Contemporary Church Historians Newsletter, vol. 3 no. 10 (Oct. 1997).
5) Review of The Bridge Betrayed by Talip Kucukcan, in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1998), p. 400.
6) Chris William Erdman, "The Dead Zone: The Killing Fields of Bosnia and Kosovo," Books & Culture (January-February 1999).
EXCERPT: "Michael Sells' The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia is essential for anyone who wants to understand the forces manipulated by those Balkan leaders who orchestrated the violent assault on the Slavic Muslims of Bosnia. Sells documents the way in which this assault was a religious genocide perpetrated by both Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Roman Catholic Christian extremists. He shows why and how politicians, intellectuals and clergy exploited ancient religious mythologies, ethnic loyalties, and nationalistic ambitions and used them to fuel an unholy fanaticism." [etc. etc.]
7) Stephen Huba, "Writers Take on Faith, War," The Cincinnati Post (Apr. 1, 1999)
"Michael Sells' The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (University of California Press, $14.95) is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the religious nature of the current conflict in Yugoslavia. The book, now out in paperback, is scarier than anything Stephen King could conceive."
8) "Religion More than Race Leads to Bosnian Tragedy," National Catholic Reporter, 12/6/96, Reviewed by Paul Hockenos.
9) "America and the Bosnia Genocide" New York Review of Books 12/4/97, Reviewed by Mark Danner with otherbooks on the Bosnian Tragedy, pp. 65. Second part of a multipart series.
10) "The Unholy War for Bosnia: A Look at the Twisted Christian Ideology that Fueled Atrocities in the Balkans," San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, 12/29/96, Reviewed by Paul Hockenos.
12) "Onward Christian Soldiers," In These Times, 11/25/96, Reviewed by Paul Hockenos.
13) "Christian Fundamentalism Plays Key Role in Bosnia's War, New Book Claims," Al-Jadid: A Record of ArabCulture and Arts, Nov/Dec 1996, Issue No. 13, pp. 13, 23, Reviewed by Gregg Jaeger.
14) "With God on Their Sides," The New Republic, 11/25/96, Reviewed by Istvan Deak.
15) Library Journal, 10/1/96, Reviewed by Jill Jaracz.
16) The Kirkus Reviews. 9/1/96
17) Publishers Weekly. 8/5/96
18) "Two Indispensable Books on the Former Yugoslavia," The Toronto Globe and Mail, 12/28/96, Reviewed by Patrick Rengger.
19) "Visit to a Latter Day Holocaust," The Oregonian, 1/5/97, Reviewed by Rachel Stoll.
20) Multicultural Review 6/97, Reviewed by Ed Ifkovic
21) "Religious Extremism and International Collusion behind the Bosnian Crisis" (at-tatarruf ad-dini wa tawaati'i l-`aalam waraa' azmati l-buusnati) A'lam al-Al-Khaliij, 1997, in Arabic.
22) Jon Saari, The Antioch Review, Fall, 1997.
23) Ivo Banac, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Spring 1998
24) Reviewed by J.B. Allcock in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21 i (1998), pp. 168-169.
25) Reviewed by V. Harle in European Legacy, 4 iii (1999), pp. 98-99.
26) Reviewed by M.A., Tetreault in International Journal of Middle East Studies, 30 ii (1998), pp. 278-280.
27) Reviewed by Michael Salla in Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 11 i (2000), pp. 130-132
28) Reviewed by Smail Balic in Journal of Islamic Studies, 9 i (1998), pp. 106-107.
29) Reviewed by Talip Kucukcan in Muslim World Book Review, 19 iii (1999), pp. 51-52
30) Reviewed by Abdul Raheem Kidwai in Muslim World Book Review, 20 i (1999), pp. 56
31) Reviewed by Caryn Young in New York University Journal of International Law and Politics, 29 iii (1997), pp. 374-376.
For a follow-up article by Michael Sells on the Serbian Orthodox Church and the destruction of religious monuments in Kosovo, see "Protecting Kosovo's cultural treasures," Aerotech News and Review: Journal of Aerospace and Defense Industry News (June 4, 1999).
Michael A. Sells Community of Bosnia Page