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<p> A heart-rending tale of the execution of innocents, told with eloquence and compassion by a brilliant and courageous young journalist. What is astonishing about this story of death in Pec is that it actually took place in the last year of the twentieth century and in supposedly civilized Europe. Through the life of Isa the butcher, Matt McAllester graphically depicts the precariousness of life in Kosovo under Slobodan Milosevic, and the compromises and indignities imposed upon anyone who through the accident of birth had an Albanian ethnic identity. What makes this a path-breaking account is the author's drive to find the sadistic killers who shot children in cold blood, and his insistence that they explain their crime. The story is unforgettable. <br>

(<p> To write this book, Matt McAllester walked through mountains covered with snow and hatred with rifle shots aimed at him from above. He wrote it with extraordinary talent that is equal to his bravery. <br>)-(Jimmy Breslin), ()

Winner, Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2002, Non-Fiction In badly constructed books, the reader doesn't care what happens on the next page. In well-constructed books, the reader can't wait to see what happens on the next page. This book is a rare, third kind: The reader dreads what will happen on the next page. Nevertheless, he feels compelled to read on... McAllester takes the reader not only along the streets where atrocities have been committed but inside homes while they are happening. As is the case with many good reads, the power of such scenes comes from the order in which events are presented. First the author develops a character, then later in the book informs you about his fate. Or the author will describe how a family is brutalized, then describes, almost as an aside -- in the course of a succeeding chapter about his own adventures in war-torn Kosovo -- how he meets a traumatized eyewitness to the previous account. In this way, the reader becomes an observer not only of what was happening inside Kosovo during the NATO bombardment but of what was happening to McAllester himself and how he managed to assemble his book. --Washington Post The power of McAllester's extraordinary book lies not in its comprehensiveness or its literary polish-though there are many brilliantly moving and perceptive passages-but in its shocking authenticity and deep moral concern. One gets the sense that he risked his life not simply to pursue a story, timely and important as it was, but because of the enormity of the evil being done and his conviction that, in a world of bland policy abstractions, what happened in those days inside Kosovo had to be told. --New Leader McAllester powerfully concludes that a sickening mixture of greed, ethnic hostility, and wartime nihilism has displaced the healing power for love and reconciliation for the forseeable future. One of the most thoughtful accounts of the conflict in Kosovo to date conveyed with taut journalistic clarity that should ensure the book a broad range of readers. --Kirkus, Starred Review This account is not of the 'virtual war' that Westerners saw on their television screens but of the real effects on people who consider the ravaged area home. --Library Journal, Starred Review McAllester's spare, understated prose is potent as is his exploration of the human side of geopolitics and war. --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review In a twist that took McAllester as much by surprise as it will the reader, it appears that Isa Bala lived in that ill-defined world too, a world where people make deals and concessions just to survive another day. Perhaps he believed that through such compromises, his family would be safe. if so, he was tragically wrong. --Sunday Telegraph (London) Beyond the Mountains of the Damned is a gripping, if depressing, account of what McAllester found among the ruins... There is no bravado... He offers vivid thumbnail sketches of Kosovar warriors in the field. -- Newsday McAllester offers us the kind of specific detail that we need to make other people's lives human to us. Even more importantly, he tells us how it is to be the oppressor, or at least one of the minions of the oppressors --American Book Review

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Matthew McAllester is the United Nations Bureau Chief for Newsday. He has covered the turmoil between the Palestinians and the Israelis, the war in Afghanistan, and the American-led war in Iraq. He shared a Pulitzer in 1997 for his coverage of the crash of TWA flight 800.

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