"The Wild Beast" by Peter Mass
Introduction: Peter Maass is a writer for the New York Times Magazine and has reported from Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East. He has written as well for The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Slate, and The New Yorker. Maass is the author of the short story “The Wild Beast” taken from the book “Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War”, in which chronicles the Bosnian War and won prizes from the Oversea Press Club and the Los Angeles Times. He currently resides in New York City.
Thesis Statement: Maass refers to the dark moments in humanity as “the wild beast,’ where inhumanity runs amok and all morality is lost. After reading this story it can be figured that Maass went as a reporter to the Balkans at the height of the salvage war there, but this story is not traditional war reportage. It can be seen that Maass’ brilliantly observed a moving memoir of the worst event of violence in Europe during the Bosnian War, since World War II. In his story of “The Wild Beast” he writes about what he saw during the two years of war in Bosnia for the Washington Post. Maass offers “one of the definitive accounts of Bosnia’s fin de siècle descent into madness” writing in the tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski and Michael Herr’s Dispacthes (Random House). Mass captures the national, personal, and universal implications of a civil war. One can call Maass’s work angry, stinging, profanely eloquent and often painful, what “The Wild Beast” shows us a picture of ethnic cleansing and all of its cruelty. It’s absurd detail, it’s self-justification, it’s dehumanization of the other will take its place among the classics of an unfortunate genre: the portrayal of humankind at its worst (C.Indigo) make it valuable as an account of the meaning of war and human sacrifice and which often superficially examined in other works such as “The Stanford Experiment. Maass was a correspondent for The Washington Post during the Bosnian conflict and
Thesis Statement: Maass refers to the dark moments in humanity as “the wild beast,’ where inhumanity runs amok and all morality is lost. After reading this story it can be figured that Maass went as a reporter to the Balkans at the height of the salvage war there, but this story is not traditional war reportage. It can be seen that Maass’ brilliantly observed a moving memoir of the worst event of violence in Europe during the Bosnian War, since World War II. In his story of “The Wild Beast” he writes about what he saw during the two years of war in Bosnia for the Washington Post. Maass offers “one of the definitive accounts of Bosnia’s fin de siècle descent into madness” writing in the tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski and Michael Herr’s Dispacthes (Random House). Mass captures the national, personal, and universal implications of a civil war. One can call Maass’s work angry, stinging, profanely eloquent and often painful, what “The Wild Beast” shows us a picture of ethnic cleansing and all of its cruelty. It’s absurd detail, it’s self-justification, it’s dehumanization of the other will take its place among the classics of an unfortunate genre: the portrayal of humankind at its worst (C.Indigo) make it valuable as an account of the meaning of war and human sacrifice and which often superficially examined in other works such as “The Stanford Experiment. Maass was a correspondent for The Washington Post during the Bosnian conflict and
Cited: http://www.randomhouse.com/acmart/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679763895 "Random House, Inc. Academic Resources | Love Thy Neighbor by Peter Maass "Book Review”. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Dec. 2009 . http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Love-Thy-Neighbor-Story-War-Peter-Maass/9780679763895-item.html "chapters.indigo.ca: Love Thy Neighbor: A Story Of War: Peter Maass. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Dec. 2009 . http://www.facultyshack.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=69:learning-from-evil-and-love-thy-neighbor&catid=17:reviews-previews&Itemid=21 "Learning from Evil and Love Thy Neighbor."N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Dec. 2009 . http://www.aril.org/booksf97a.htm "Book Reviews II." N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Dec. 2009 .