Books about Sarajevo from Amazon.com

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-today record of the life of a typical eleven-year-old girl, preoccupied by piano lessons and birthday parties. But as war engulfs Sarajevo, Zlata Filipovi´c 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..
Price: $3.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A spare and haunting, wise and beautiful novel about the endurance of the human spirit and the subtle ways individuals reclaim their humanity in a city ravaged by war.

In a city under siege, four people whose lives have been upended are ultimately reminded of what it is to be human. From his window, a musician sees twenty-two of his friends and neighbors waiting in a breadline. Then, in a flash, they are killed by a mortar attack. In an act of defiance, the man picks up his cello and decides to play at the site of the shelling for twenty-two days, honoring their memory. Elsewhere, a young man leaves home to collect drinking water for his family and, in the face of danger, must weigh the value of generosity against selfish survivalism. A third man, older, sets off in search of bread and distraction and instead runs into a long-ago friend who reminds him of the city he thought he had lost, and the man he once was. As both men are drawn into the orbit of cello music, a fourth character—a young woman, a sniper—holds the fate of the cellist in her hands. As she protects him with her life, her own army prepares to challenge the kind of person she has become.

A novel of great intensity and power, and inspired by a true story, The Cellist of Sarajevo poignantly explores how war can change oneÂ’s definition of humanity, the effect of music on our emotional endurance, and how a romance with the rituals of daily life can itself be a form of resistance..
Price: $12.54 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Published in Britain to great acclaim -- a startling, gut-wrenching memoir of war, personal dissolution, and rebirth -- based on the author's experiences in Bosnia.

When tragedy strikes Bill Carter's life he finds himself drawn to an unlikely place -- Bosnia, in the midst of its civil war. Searching for meaning in the heart of darkness, he manages to find lodging in an abandoned tower block and sets out getting supplies to the starved, besieged citizens of Sarajevo. It is there that Carter emerges from his stupor. Inspired by a community of people working to bring relief to the city, he daringly enlists the help of music group U2 and its lead singer, Bono, who set up satellite links on the band's Zooropa tour that allowed ordinary citizens of Sarajevo to speak unedited and live on 90-foot television screens to thousands of concertgoers worldwide.

Just as Michael Herr's Vietnam memoir Dispatches captured the horror of war for the '60s generation, Bill Carter's Fools Rush In will be the seminal book for this generation on the visceral and transformative impact of war in our time..
Price: $4.92 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"A mystery tinged by the politics of today...Brutally realistic " --U.S. News  & World Report

Dan Fesperman, a journalist who reported from a number of war zones, has written a masterful murder mystery in the vein of early le Carré and Graham Greene.

Vlado Petric is a homicide investigator in war-torn Sarajevo.  When he encounters an unidentified body near "sniper alley," he realizes that it is the body of Esmir Vitas, chief of the Interior Ministry's special police, and that Vitas has been killed not by any sniper's aim but by a bullet fired at almost pointblank range.  Searching for the killer in this "city of murderers," Petric finds himself drawn into a conspriacy, the scope of which goes beyond anything he could possibly have imagined..
Price: $1.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Vlado Petric, a former homicide detective in Sarajevo, is now living in exile, and making a meagre living working at a Berlin construction site, when an American investigator for the International War Crimes Tribunal recruits him to return home on a mission. The assignment sounds simple enough. He is to help capture an aging Nazi collaborator who has become a war profiteer. But nothing is simple in the Balkans: Petric is also being used as bait to lure his quarry into the open, and when the operation goes sour he is drawn across Europe into a dangerous labyrinth of secret identities, stolen gold, and horrifying discoveries about his own family’s past.

Intelligent and suspenseful, The Small Boat of Great Sorrows brings together chilling crimes, the lies people live and the cold facts of international politics into a masterful, electrifying thriller..
Price: $2.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The 73-year life span of Yugoslavia roughly coincides with what historians have called "the short 20th century," from the onset of World War I to the end of the cold war. It was always a tenuously constructed nation, and when it finally collapsed, Roger Cohen was there, dutifully filing reports for the New York Times. In Hearts Grown Brutal, he adds depth and personal drama to the stories of civil war and ethnicide, and he points an accusing finger at the Western nations who put the lie to any notion of a "new world order" by offering only half-hearted challenges to Serbian aggression until nearly 250,000 innocents had died and 2.7 million civilians had been driven from their homes.

Cohen, like many Western analysts, observes that the clash between Muslim Bosnians, Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs had been in the making for hundreds of years. But he locates the origins of the recent "collective madness"--as one Serbian leader called it--in World War II, when Croatia sided with the Nazis and when Serbia took the opportunity of the German invasion to settle old scores against Croats, Muslims, Jews, and Gypsies. Ordinary men and women of Yugoslavia committed extraordinary acts of inhumanity against one another during the war against Hitler. Post-Communist civil war gave them license to hate one another anew: when Serbia struck out at Bosnia and Croatia, all three nations fell into a frenzy of slaughter whose repercussions will be felt for generations to come. Hearts Grown Brutal is a somber, horrifying indictment of all involved that stands as an essential work of contemporary history. --Gregory McNamee.
Price: $15.24 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The universally respected NPR journalist and bestselling memoirist Scott Simon makes a dazzling fiction debut. In Pretty Birds, Simon creates an intense, startling, and tragicomic portrait of a classic character–a young woman in the besieged city of Sarajevo in the early 1990s.

In the spring of 1992, Irena Zaric is a star on her Sarajevo high school basketball team, a tough, funny teenager who has taught her parrot, Pretty Bird, to do a decent imitation of a ball hitting a hoop. Irena wears her hair short like k. d. lang’s, and she loves Madonna, Michael Jordan, and Johnny Depp. But while Irena rocks out and shoots baskets with her friends, her beloved city has become a battleground. When the violence and terror of “ethnic cleansing” against Muslims begins, Irena and her family, brutalized by Serb soldiers, flee for safety across the river that divides the city.

If once Irena knew of war only from movies and history books, now she knows its reality. She steals from the dead to buy food. She scuttles under windows in her own home to dodge bullets. She risks her life to communicate with an old Serb school friend and teammate. Even Pretty Bird has started to mimic the sizzle of mortar fire.

In a city starved for work, a former assistant principal offers Irena a vague job, “duties as assigned,” which she accepts. She begins by sweeping floors, but soon, under the tutelage of a cast of rogues and heroes, she learns to be a sniper, biding her time, never returning to the same perch, and searching her targets for the “mist” that marks a successful shot. Ultimately, Irena’s new vocation will lead to complex and cataclysmic consequences for herself and those she loves.

As a journalist, Scott Simon covered the siege of Sarajevo. Here, in a novel as suspenseful as a John le Carré thriller, he re-creates the atmosphere of that place and time and the pain and dark humor of its people. Pretty Birds is a bold departure, and the auspicious beginning of yet another brilliant career for its author.


From the Hardcover edition..
Price: $9.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]