FOOLS RUSH IN: The Book That Inspired the Movie Kiss the Future

by Bill S. Carter

Overview

Now the basis for the major documentary film, Kiss the Future.

This "extraordinary human story" (Irish Times) is Bill Carter's deeply personal memoir of his experience in the war-torn city of Sarajevo. In 1991, the 26-year-old Carter joined up with a maverick aid organization to deliver food to orphanages across the city while dressed as a clown. He soon discovered the underground world of punk rock clubs, discos and a thriving cultural scene within the besieged city where art and music were used as a defiant act against the war. It was this creative spirit that led Carter on a journey to draw attention to the war in Bosnia and inspire hope among its people by convincing the rock band U2 to beam the citizens of Sarajevo into their stadium concerts via satellite.

Fools Rush In is a memoir of witness that shines an indelible light on the people of Sarajevo and their deep belief in coexistence during the longest siege in modern history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639640515
Publisher:	Schaffner Press
Publication date:	05/07/2024
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Bill Carter is an author, filmmaker, humanitarian activist and teacher of documentary film journalism at Northern Arizona University. He is the author of three books, including FOOLS RUSH IN: RED SUMMER and BOOM, BUST, BOOM, both critically acclaimed journalistic memoirs. He is an award winning documentary filmmaker whose own film of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, "Miss Sarajevo" has won numerous awards and accolades, and both his memoir and the film have since led to the making of the Paramount film, KISS THE FUTURE. He and his family live near Flagstaff, Arizona.

Editorial Reviews

Carter’s book reads like a novel, evoking a lost city inhabited by angels, bandits, punks and adrenaline fiends. (He) reaches far beyond personal experience to find the story of a wounded city, and a war that pitted neighbor against neighbor in a nightmare of endless hatred.”
—Ginanne Brownell, NEWSWEEK

“This lively book is like Good Morning, Vietnam crossed with a Conrad novel.”
—The London Times

“Few writers have traveled a more remarkable path than fisherman-humanitarian-filmmaker-author Bill Carter.”
—David Swanson, Rolling Stone

“Fools Rush In is as angry and outraged as it must be, yet funnier and warmer than you’d expect it to be. In besieged Sarajevo, physically and psychologically a long way from home, Carter finds unlikely kindred spirits: circus performers, disc jockeys, musicians, writers, artists, barstool philosophers—and, at the other end of a satellite link, the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world.”
—Andrew Mueller, journalist and author of I WOULDN’T START HERE: The 21st Century and Where it All Went Wrong

“Self-justifying, yet never self-glorifying, this memoir…is simultaneously engaging and electrifying.”
—The Observer

“Carter’s self-styled relief mission offers a rare walking tour inside a war that was famously hard to parse while it was occurring, and remains tragically unexamined by much of the world in its aftermath.”
—Jim Breuthaupt, Bomb

“Carter has the courage to reveal things as he sees them. He has lived on the edge and returns here to tell what he saw.”
—Frank Shouldice, The Irish Independent

“Bill Carter is more than a digital age Huck Finn. He is not merely writing here, he is singing, as if his life depended upon it. And you get the very real sense that it does. This drama is an honest, wry, immensely humane look at coming of age at the edge of a bomb crater.”
—Doug Stanton, author of IN HARM’S WAY

“Fiercely intelligent…It is a deeply felt emotional reaction to the horror and the humanity that Bill Carter would witness…Told with the passion of one who came to identify himself with the tragedy of Bosnia, not as an observer.”
—The Guardian

“This is a book with miraculous twists, where the absolute desperation touches the cosmic loneliness of people from Sarajevo during the war. Bill Carter was one of them, he was proud of it but that’s not everything: He knows how to tell it in the very best way.”
—DANI Magazine, Sarajevo

“In recounting an extraordinary human story, it simmers with a quiet rage and a remarkable self-awareness.”
—Irish Times

“Carter’s book deserves a wider audience: his shell-shocked tales of life in the besieged city paint a powerful picture of ordinary people trying to survive in hell.”
—Ink

“It’s been held that there are only seven original stories, most of them cogged from the Greek: basic templates that have provided endless variations from Homer to Hemingway. To this lineage we can add Bill Carter’s book, Fools Rush In.”
—Hot Press

From the Publisher