Author: Elma Softić
Publisher: Ruminator Books
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
"Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights is an extraordinary document of life deep inside one of the world's most war-ravaged regions." "Until the spring of 1992, when she was thirty, Elma Softic led a relatively ordinary, happy, middle-class life. She lived with her parents and sister, taught philosophy at a business college, and enjoyed the typical cafe life of a cosmopolitan city." "When the Serbs began bombing that spring, Elma began a diary, her attempt to bear what seemed increasingly unbearable, to stay focused while living in a state of siege. Eventually, she "got sick of it. The war was no longer something to put oneself out for." Rather, what she needed was a listener, someone to talk to about day to day life in Sarajevo. Through ham radio correspondence, she made new friends in Zagreb, who asked her to put her observations on paper in the form of open letters. It was these letters, first passed hand to hand, then reaching an ever-larger public in Croatia and throughout Europe, that created a sensation with their eloquent, sometimes stunning descriptions of modern life - a life not unlike our own - rendered primitive by war." "Published in Canada for the first time in English and now available to readers in the United States, Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights is a collection of Elma's diaries and letters, dated April 1992 to June 1995. With a novelist's eye for detail and a natural storyteller's gift for narrative, she gives clear and compelling voice to a place, a conflict and a life that are, for the most part, unthinkable, unspeakable and unimaginable."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Elma Softic
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781550138702
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Translated by Nada Conic, Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights is an extraordinary document of life deep inside one of the world's most war-ravaged regions. (1997)
Author: Atka Reid
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408827751
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
A moving and compelling true story about two sisters fighting for survival in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war
Author: Miljenko Jergovic
Publisher: Archipelago
ISBN: 1935744739
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
One of the 25 Books That Inspired the World (1989–2014), World Literature Today A remarkable and bracing collection of “classic anti-war writing” from a Croatian writer whose piercing prose recalls Kurt Vonnegut and Aleksander Hemon (Richard Flanagan, Booker Prize–winning author) Miljenko Jergović’s remarkable debut collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro, earned him wide acclaim throughout Europe. In “melancholy, dreamlike” prose, the stories in Sarajevo Marlboro “recall Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, but Jergovic’s book is the strongest of the three” (Maud Newton). Croatian by birth, Jergović spent his childhood in Sarajevo and chose to remain there throughout most of the war. These stories are distinctly of the material world, and they are shaped by Jergović’s deeply personal vision, subterranean humor, and a razor-sharp understanding of the fate of the city’s young Muslims, Croats, and Serbs—the minute details of their interior lives in the foreground, the killing zone in the background.
Author: Barbara Demick
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679644121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Logavina Street was a microcosm of Sarajevo, a six-block-long history lesson. For four centuries, it existed as a quiet residential area in a charming city long known for its ethnic and religious tolerance. On this street of 240 families, Muslims and Christians, Serbs and Croats lived easily together, unified by their common identity as Sarajevans. Then the war tore it all apart. As she did in her groundbreaking work about North Korea, Nothing to Envy, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick tells the story of the Bosnian War and the brutal and devastating three-and-a-half-year siege of Sarajevo through the lives of ordinary citizens, who struggle with hunger, poverty, sniper fire, and shellings. Logavina Street paints this misunderstood war and its effects in vivid strokes—at once epic and intimate—revealing the heroism, sorrow, resilience, and uncommon faith of its people. With a new Introduction, final chapter, and Epilogue by the author
Author: Emily Greble
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801461219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
On April 15, 1941, Sarajevo fell to Germany's 16th Motorized Infantry Division. The city, along with the rest of Bosnia, was incorporated into the Independent State of Croatia, one of the most brutal of Nazi satellite states run by the ultranationalist Croat Ustasha regime. The occupation posed an extraordinary set of challenges to Sarajevo's famously cosmopolitan culture and its civic consciousness; these challenges included humanitarian and political crises and tensions of national identity. As detailed for the first time in Emily Greble's book, the city’s complex mosaic of confessions (Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish) and ethnicities (Croat, Serb, Jew, Bosnian Muslim, Roma, and various other national minorities) began to fracture under the Ustasha regime’s violent assault on "Serbs, Jews, and Roma"—contested categories of identity in this multiconfessional space—tearing at the city’s most basic traditions. Nor was there unanimity within the various ethnic and confessional groups: some Catholic Croats detested the Ustasha regime while others rode to power within it; Muslims quarreled about how best to position themselves for the postwar world, and some cast their lot with Hitler and joined the ill-fated Muslim Waffen SS. In time, these centripetal forces were complicated by the Yugoslav civil war, a multisided civil conflict fought among Communist Partisans, Chetniks (Serb nationalists), Ustashas, and a host of other smaller groups. The absence of military conflict in Sarajevo allows Greble to explore the different sides of civil conflict, shedding light on the ways that humanitarian crises contributed to civil tensions and the ways that marginalized groups sought political power within the shifting political system. There is much drama in these pages: In the late days of the war, the Ustasha leaders, realizing that their game was up, turned the city into a slaughterhouse before fleeing abroad. The arrival of the Communist Partisans in April 1945 ushered in a new revolutionary era, one met with caution by the townspeople. Greble tells this complex story with remarkable clarity. Throughout, she emphasizes the measures that the city’s leaders took to preserve against staggering odds the cultural and religious pluralism that had long enabled the city’s diverse populations to thrive together.
Author: Peter Andreas
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457041
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
The 1992–1995 battle for Sarajevo was the longest siege in modern history. It was also the most internationalized, attracting a vast contingent of aid workers, UN soldiers, journalists, smugglers, and embargo-busters. The city took center stage under an intense global media spotlight, becoming the most visible face of post-Cold War conflict and humanitarian intervention. However, some critical activities took place backstage, away from the cameras, including extensive clandestine trading across the siege lines, theft and diversion of aid, and complicity in the black market by peacekeeping forces. In Blue Helmets and Black Markets, Peter Andreas traces the interaction between these formal front-stage and informal backstage activities, arguing that this created and sustained a criminalized war economy and prolonged the conflict in a manner that served various interests on all sides. Although the vast majority of Sarajevans struggled for daily survival and lived in a state of terror, the siege was highly rewarding for some key local and international players. This situation also left a powerful legacy for postwar reconstruction: new elites emerged via war profiteering and an illicit economy flourished partly based on the smuggling networks built up during wartime. Andreas shows how and why the internationalization of the siege changed the repertoires of siege-craft and siege defenses and altered the strategic calculations of both the besiegers and the besieged. The Sarajevo experience dramatically illustrates that just as changes in weapons technologies transformed siege warfare through the ages, so too has the arrival of CNN, NGOs, satellite phones, UN peacekeepers, and aid convoys. Drawing on interviews, reportage, diaries, memoirs, and other sources, Andreas documents the business of survival in wartime Sarajevo and the limits, contradictions, and unintended consequences of international intervention. Concluding with a comparison of the battle for Sarajevo with the sieges of Leningrad, Grozny, and Srebrenica, and, more recently, Falluja, Blue Helmets and Black Markets is a major contribution to our understanding of contemporary urban warfare, war economies, and the political repercussions of humanitarian action.
Author: Zlata Filipovic
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143036876
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
The child's diary that awakened the conscience of the world When Zlata’s Diary was first published at the height of the Bosnian conflict, it became an international bestseller and was compared to The Diary of Anne Frank, both for the freshness of its voice and the grimness of the world it describes. It begins as the day-to-day record of the life of a typical eleven-year-old girl, preoccupied by piano lessons and birthday parties. But as war engulfs Sarajevo, Zlata Filipovic becomes a witness to food shortages and the deaths of friends and learns to wait out bombardments in a neighbor’s cellar. Yet throughout she remains courageous and observant. The result is a book that has the power to move and instruct readers a world away.
Author: John McCutcheon
Publisher: Holiday House
ISBN: 1682636747
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 35
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Book Description
Young Drasko is happy working with his father in the Sarajevo market. Then war encroaches. Drasko must run the family flower stand alone. One morning, the bakery is bombed and twenty-two people are killed. The next day, a cellist walks to the bombsite and plays the most heartbreaking music Drasko can imagine. The cellist returns for twenty-two days, one day for each victim of the bombing. Inspired by the musician's response, Drasko finds a way to help make Sarajevo beautiful again. Inspired by real events of the Bosnian War, award-winning songwriter and storyteller John McCutcheon tells the uplifting story of the power of beauty in the face of violence and suffering. The story comes to life with the included CD in which cellist Vedran Smailović accompanies McCutcheon and performs the melody that he played in 1992 to honor those who died in the Sarajevo mortar blast.
Author: Zlata Filipović
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9780140242058
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Excerpts from the author's diary, begun when she was eleven, describes life in Sarajevo under siege.
