Morbid, Mladic moved about, stiffening soldiers' backbones for the blood-bath ahead... Then, in ail their mighty malignancy, Mladic's men, spitting hatred, struck like a cobra at the doomed ghetto... After the slaughter of Srebrenica, Mladic, for a time, went on meeting with international officiais. He had a habit of winking at me across the table.

If Belgrade was big and brash, Sarajevo -seemed empty but, somehow, throbbing quietly—like an open wound... It was as if Sarajevo went through mood swings that were at least human while Belgrade was more controlled: a polluted glacier slowly moving downhill but with some of its purged, hunted, and decayed skeletons and carcasses stuck in the ice. There was a smell of corruption in the air.

"Passionate, power fui and profound, 'Aza Beast' is not only a personal account of the war in Bosnia but a professional observation of the ,roots of war in general - and of humankind's slow odyssey toward treating those roots as the most dangerous disease of all. Beautifully written, Murphy's book is both history and warning:- the Beast that stalked Auschwitz showed its face main in Bosnia, and is not yet dead"