My War Gone By, I Miss It So
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5.0 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A “beautiful and disturbing” account of the Bosnian conflict by a war correspondent grappling with addiction and a family legacy of military heroism (The Wall Street Journal).
In an earlier era, Anthony Loyd imagines, he would have fought fascism in Spain. Instead, the twenty-six-year-old scion of a distinguished military family left England in 1993 to experience the conflict in Bosnia as a reporter. While he found his time serving in the British army during the Gulf War disappointingly uneventful, Loyd would spend the next three years documenting some of the most callous and chaotic fighting to ever occur on European soil.
Plunged into the midst of the struggle among the Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslims, Loyd saw humanity at its extremes, witnessing tragedy daily in city streets and mountain villages. Shocking yet ultimately redemptive, Loyd’s memoir is an uncompromising feat of on-the-ground reportage. But Loyd’s personal war didn’t end when he emerged from the trenches. Hooked to the adrenaline of armed combat, he returned home to continue his own longstanding battle against drug addiction.
“Battlefield reportage does not get more up close, gruesome, and personal. . . . The fear and confusion of battle are so vivid that in places, they rise like acrid smoke from the page.” —The New York Times
“This is pure war reporting, free from the usual journalistic constraints that often give a false significance to suffering.” —Salon.com
“First-rate war correspondence . . . [in] the great tradition of Hemingway, Caputo, and Michael Herr.” —The Boston Globe
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"It was not necessarily that I had `found myself' during the war, but the conflict had certainly put a kind of buffer zone between the fault lines in my head." Writing with a combat veteran's dark knowledge and a seasoned war correspondent's edgy, hesitant desire to cling to some sort of confidence in humanity, Loyd delivers a searing firsthand account of the war in Bosnia that successfully blends autobiographical confession and war reportage. Loyd, a veteran of the Persian Gulf War (where he was a platoon commander), was deep into suicidal depression and heavy drinking when, at 26, he left London for war-torn Bosnia in 1993 (he got assignments for British newspapers and is now a Times of London correspondent). After returning to England in 1995 by way of Chechnya, he sank into heroin addiction before pulling himself together and returning to cover the Balkan carnage through 1996. He admits to a grim fascination with war as the ultimate frontier of human experience. Just when a reader begins to feel that Loyd is too cynical and detached, a scorchingly lyrical passage will illuminate the Balkan war in all its anarchic horror. While Loyd finds plenty of guilt all around, he is highly sympathetic to the Bosnian Muslims, approves of NATO's bombing of the Serbs and chastises U.N. troops for standing idly by while thousands of Muslims were slaughtered in Srebrenica, a designated U.N. "safe area." On the autobiographical front, he attributes his immersion in war to his hostile relationship with his intimidating father, and to his family's complex web of national and ethnic origins (Austrian, English, Belgian, Egyptian, Jewish). Not like any other book on the Yugoslav war, his gripping, viscerally subjective chronicle puts a human face on the tragedy as it mourns the strangled soul of multiethnic Bosnia.
