Emina Melonic

An age demands a name when it’s an age of upheaval. The name should describe the ills of society and even suggest their cure. Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society aims to do exactly that — and succeeds in ways that he might not have intended. Douthat rejects the common view of decadence as Caligula-inspired orgies or Marquis de Sade-style perversion, or even excessive consumption of chocolate cake by women. For him, decadence is ‘neither empty of any judgment nor excessively deterministic’. He finds this sweet spot in the work of Jacques Barzun, who defined decadent times by their ‘deep concerns’ and ‘peculiarly restless’ mood.

My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide has caused a stir in Bosnia-Herzegovina and especially among the Bosnian community in the United States. Jessica Stern, who has previously written on the psychology of terrorists, attempts to get inside the mind of convicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic, who has been convicted of orchestrating the genocide of Bosnian Muslims during the Yugoslavian wars (1991-2001). The recent excerpt in the New York Times — an excerpt which Stern, bizarrely, has disavowed — turns out to be representative of not only Stern’s methodology in interviewing Karadzic, but also the seductive spell under which she has fallen.

‘Why Did I Let a Convicted War Criminal Practice Energy Healing on Me?’ wonders Jessica Stern in a New York Times excerpt from her forthcoming book. The war criminal in question is Radovan Karadžić, a Bosnian Serb leader responsible for the energetic orchestration and execution of genocide against Bosnian Muslims during the 1990s war. His most notorious crime against humanity includes the murder of over 8,000 Muslim men and boys over a few days in Srebrenica. The book in question is My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide, a memoir of Stern’s interviews with Karadžić.