Madness Visible
A Memoir of War
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- 179,00 kr
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- 179,00 kr
Publisher Description
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'A moving book by one of our generation's finest foreign correspondents' - Daily Telegraph
'A terrifying account, soberly written ... Presents a stunning portrait of the anarchy, cruelty and overwhelming confusion of contemporary wars' - Independent
'Janine di Giovanni is superb - an extraordinarily brave war correspondent and a wonderful writer as well. What a combination!' - William Shawcross
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The remarkable story of a woman on the frontline giving an extraordinary, personal account of the Balkan wars
Award-winning journalist Janine di Giovanni spent much of the 1990s observing the cycles of violence and vengeance from inside Balkan cities and villages, refugee camps and makeshift hospitals. This was a conflict that raised challenging questions: what causes neighbours, whose families have lived peacefully for centuries, to turn with mindless brutality against one another? How do we measure the difference between bravery and cowardice in a conflict so morally ill-defined? What becomes of survivors when the fabric of an age-old community is destroyed?
Searching for answers, di Giovanni brings the reality of war into focus: children dying from lack of medicine, women driven to despair and madness by their experiences in paramilitary rape camps and soldiers numbed by and inured to the atrocities they committed. In Madness Visible she paints an indelible portrait of the Balkans under siege and shows the true - human - cost of war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"It is only possible to love one war," writes di Giovanni in this devastating memoir of the Balkans, quoting another intrepid war journalist, Martha Gellhorn. For Gellhorn, it was the Spanish Civil War; for di Giovanni, it's the series of conflicts that, since 1991, have consumed the republics of the former Yugoslavia. Expanded from a Vanity Fair article, this book presents a harrowing firsthand account of a region's spiral into madness. Di Giovanni, a senior foreign correspondent for The Times (London), was there almost from the beginning: she shuddered through the first icy winter of the Sarajevo siege (the longest in modern history); she sipped tea with Arkan, the dreaded leader of the ethnic-cleansing paramilitary Tigers; she stood shoulder to shoulder with Serb revolutionaries on "Day One" of the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic. The book deals primarily with di Giovanni's experiences covering the most recent war 1999's conflict in Kosovo but it moves through time from the initial dissolution of Yugoslavia to the most recent, guardedly optimistic attempts at reconstruction. Di Giovanni provides ample historical context to the fighting (readers seeking to understand the separatist impulse of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church or Milosevic's "mother complex" have plenty of evidence to play with), but eventually, the names and dates of massacres and treaties pale next to the spectacle of pure horror: a dog trotting by with a human hand in its mouth; a crazed woman lying naked in full view of snipers, begging to be shot. Di Giovanni has written a tragicbook that vividly memorializes the millions who suffered in the name of religion, nationality and ego. Map not seen by PW.
