MixedBook Post...Stern comes across as reluctant to ask her subject the really hard questions. Stern says it’s because she didn’t want Karadzic to lie to her and she hoped that seeing things through his eyes would lead to some deeper truth. The problem is it never does ... Only toward the end of the book does Stern prick ever so gently at whatever sliver of morality she believes may be lurking inside Karadzic. \'Is there anything you regret?\' she asks. Karadzic stares at her blankly. “No, I had to protect my people,” he responds. And there it’s left, the predictable slogans of a nationalist justifying the unthinkable, no more than we could have learned from the headlines ... Even the title of her book, My War Criminal, is unsettling, a caption to a two-year-long cerebral tug of war that disturbingly comes across as a quasi-intellectual love affair ... Over almost three hundred pages, Stern gives Karadzic a free hand to spin a self-serving story of his skills as a mystic with bioenergetic healing powers, a poet...a shrewd politician, a powerful orator capable of moving a mob, and, above all, the protector of the Serbian people ... I had come to Stern’s book hoping for greater insight and regrettably found none.
