McAllester, Matthew 1969-

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McALLESTER, Matthew 1969-

PERSONAL: Born 1969, in London, England. Education: Attended University of Sussex; Clark University, M.A.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, New York University Press, 838 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10003.

CAREER: Clark University, teaching assistant; Newsday, New York, NY, correspondent, 1994—.

AWARDS, HONORS: Pulitzer Prize (with others), 1997, for Newsday coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island.

WRITINGS:

Beyond the Mountains of the Damned: The War inside Kosovo, New York University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: After graduating from college, Matthew McAllester began writing for Newsday, first as a Long Island reporter, during which time he shared the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Newsday's coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800; and later as Newsday's cyberspace reporter and columnist. It was, however, his post as Middle East correspondent that has provided him with the material for his book Beyond the Mountains of the Damned.

Beyond the Mountains of the Damned, published in 2001, is a story about the war in Kosovo, as seen through the eyes of two men, one a Serb, the other a Kosovar. To gain access to the material he would use for his book, McAllester had to get inside the country, and although he never gained proper authority from the Yugoslavian government to enter Kosovo, he managed to go there anyway. He traveled to the most devastated of all the cities, that of Pec, where the earliest destruction of the conflict and the most horrific atrocities took place. It was through two men he met that McAllester hoped to find answers to his questions of how such a war could exist in this modern age. How could neighbors, such as the two men whose lives he examined, turn on each other with so much hate and lack of remorse at the murders that were occurring? While the Albanian man, Isa Bala, and his family faced death every day, both from the NATO bombings as well as from the killings at the hands of the Serbs, the other man, Nebojsa Minic, a Serb militiaman, ruled the city through torture and mass killings.

Isa Bala, the Albanian, is a butcher by trade, a simple man who only wants to provide for, and protect, his family. Minic is a Serbian gangster who has two tattoos: one on his lower lip and one on his chest. Both tattoos proclaim the same message. One is the Serbian word for "dead," the other reads, "dead man." Before the war, Minic was a petty thief. During the war he becomes a mass murderer. His hatred of Albanians is less inflamed by ethnic differences than it is by a huge drug deal that went sour and for which he blames his Albanian business partners. In interviews with McAllester, he boasted, without fear of reprisal, of the number of Muslim women he raped.

In his review of Beyond the Mountains of the Damned, critic Robert D. Kaplan for the Washington Post Book World wrote: "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."

Kaplan praised McAllester for his writing skill and his ability to piece together a "good read" by first developing "a character, then later in the book inform[ing] you about his fate," McAllester builds a relationship between the character and the reader before passing on the details of the character's ordeal, thus drawing the reader into the story, more like a piece of fiction rather than as a news brief that only relates the facts.

George Jaeger, in the New Leader, was equally impressed with McAllester's ability to weave a story together. "McAllester brings the Kosovo ground war into searing focus. Like The Scream, Edvard Munch's famous painting, Beyond the Mountains of the Damned cuts through all other issues and insists on renewed attention to the excruciating pain suffered by the victims."

In order to put together the story of the Kosovo victims, McAllester had to climb over a mountain range that, in fact, was named the Mountains of the Damned. He did so in March 1999, in the midst of a snowstorm. McAllester's goal was to reach Pec in order to give an eyewitness account of the cultural cleansing that thousands of refugees claimed was going on. Two of McAllester's guides were captured and tortured, causing him to later reflect on the ethics of his decision to risk so much in order to gain a story.

Jaeger commented that Beyond the Mountains of the Damned contains "deftly drawn portraits [that] show imperfect, ordinary people responding in very human ways to extraordinary uncertainties and deadly dangers." The book's strength, Jaeger wrote, "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."