The Balkan Express, Slavenka Drakulic, HarperPerennial, 1993
This is a group of essays about the Yugoslav civil war of the early '90s. While much of the world was hearing about the destruction of Vukovar, the siege of Sarajevo, or ethnic cleansing, Drakulic, a Croatian journalist living in Zagreb, was writing about things like neighbors suddenly turning on each other because they belong to different ethnic groups.
One essay is about her father, a veteran of Tito's partisan army during World War II, who was emotionally changed by the war and never told her about it. Another essay is the story of how it feels to be a refugee, occupying an apartment in Ljubljana of a friend who has fled to France. There is more than one essay about death close up; seeing a report about a shell destroying a house and wondering what the people inside were doing at that moment; seeing a photo of a man with half his head blown away.
If there is such a thing as a list of must-read "reference" books on the effects of modern war away from the front lines, this book should be included on that list. It is filled with passionate and eloquent writing on the tiny ways that war seeps into a person's soul until they are consumed by it.
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