A big thanks to Shaina at The Daily Seyahatname for motivating me to finally follow through on my long-ago promise to create an annotated bibliography of books on Bosnia and the Bosnian War for general readers. Her offer to work on it with me is greatly appreciated.
For now, I wish to focus mostly on reliable and "sympathetic works"; if time permits, later I will add an additional section on works of revisionism, distortion, propaganda, and so forth. But for now, I prefer to start with books I would actually recommend to someone who wishes to understand the conflicts of the 1990s in greater detail and with the proper context.
Here is a list of books Shaina and I put together; please feel free to suggest other titles we've overlooked.
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A Problem From Hell:America in the Age of Genocide/Samantha Power
Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace/Sara Terry
Balkan Express/Slavenka Drakulic
The Balkans/Mark Mazower
The Balkans/Misha Glenny
Balkan Tragedy/Susan Woodward
Be Not Afraid, for You Have Sons in America/Stacey Sullivan
Black Book of Bosnia/Editors of “New Republic”
Blood and Vengeance/Chuck Sudetic
Bosnia: A Short History/Noel Malcolm
Bosnia: A Tradition Betrayed/Donia and Fine
Bosnia After Dayton/Sumantra Bose
The Bosnian Muslims: Denial of a Nation/Friedman
The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo/Clea Koff
The Bridge Betrayed/Michael Sells
Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia/ Udovicki and Ridgeway, ed.
Conceit of Innocence/Mestrovic
Complicity With Evil/Adam LeBor
Cry Bosnia/Paul Harris
The Culture of Politics in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives/Eric Gordy
The Destruction of Yugoslavia/Branka Magas
Divide and Fall/Radha Kumar
Endgame/David Rohde
The Fall of Yugoslavia/Misha Glenny
The Fixer/Joe Sacco
Fools Rush In/Bill Carter
From Enemy Territory/Mladen Vuksanovic
Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943/Marko Attila Hoare
Genocide in Bosnia/Norman Cigar
Hearts Grown Brutal/Roger Cohen
Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide/Branimir Anzulovic
The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day/Marko Attila Hoare
How Bosnia Armed/Marko Attila Hoare
Hunting the Tiger: The Fast Life and Violent Death of the Balkan’s Most Dangerous Man (Arkan)/Christopher S. Stewart
In Harm’s Way/Martin Bell
Indictment at the Hague/Norman Cigar, Paul Williams
The Key To My Neighbor’s House/Elizabeth Neuffer
Kosovo/Tim Judah
Kosovo/Noel Malcolm
Like Eating a Stone
Love Thy Neighbor/Peter Maass
Madness Visible/ Janine di Giovanni
Merry Christmas, Mr. Larry/Larry Hollingsworth
Milosevic: A Biography/Adam LeBor
My War Gone By, I Miss it So/Anthony Lloyd
The New Bosnian Mosaic/Bougarel, Helms, Duijzings
Not My Turn To Die/Heleta
A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia/Mark Thompson
Postcards from the Grave/ Emir Suljagic
-personal memoir, Srebrenica
Safe Area Gorazde/Joe Sacco
Sarajevo: A War Journal/Zlatko Dixdarevic
Sarajevo Blues/Semezdin Mehmedinovic
Sarajevo Daily/Tom Gjelten
Sarajevo: Exodus of a City
Seasons in Hell/ Ed Vulliamy
Serbia’s Secret War/Philip Cohen
The Serbs/Tim Judah
Slaughterhouse/David Reiff
Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime/ Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both
The Suitcase: Refugee voices from Bosnia and Croatia/
The Stone Fields/Courtney Angela Broic
The Tenth Circle of Hell/Rezak Hukanovic
Then They Started Shooting/Dynne Jones
They Would Never Hurt a Fly/ Slavenka Drakulic
This Time We Knew/Cushman and Mestrovic
To End A War/Holbrooke
Under the UN Flag/Hasan Nuhanovic
War Hospital/Sheri Fink
The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: ethnic conflict and international intervention/Burg and Shoup
War Hospital/Sheri Fink
This Was Not Our War: Bosnian women reclaiming the peace/Hunt
Wly Bosnia/Rabia Ali, ed.
When History is a Nightmare/Stevan Weine
A Witness to Genocide/Gutman
With their Backs to the World/Asne Seierstand
Yugoslavia’s Floody Collapse/Christopher Bennett
Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation/Silber and Little
Other
Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in Siege of Sarajevo
Raw Memory
To Know Where He is Buried
10 comments:
I'm very happy that you're devoting yourselves to such a huge task!
Kosova Express - James Pettifer
Owen
(OpenID not working)
Myth of Ethnic War by V.P. Gagnon is a good one. While not Yugoslav specific, Remnants of War by John Mueller is also worthwhile.
Mestrovic's name is Stjepan Mestrovic, at Texas A&M University. Go to his webpage and pull his CV...there are lots more on Croatia...
Cushman and Mestrovic, This time we knew
Thank you very much for sharing this list. I am just now beginning my MA research on Bosnia, so this is very useful. I would love to help with this if you are going to make it into a longer project.... let me know your plans. Thanks again!
Christine
http://christinebednarz.wordpress.com/
PS-
Sarajevo Marlboro/ Miljenko Jergović
Balkan as Metaphor/ Bjelić and Savić, ed.
"Not My Turn to Die"?
Come on, both of you. That piece of propaganda is useless. Authored by Slavko Heleta, son of a Chetnik, and marketed to promote lies about the so called suffering of Chetniks in Gorazde, come on... In the past, I had a nasty confontation with Heleta on Shaina's blog. I suspect Shaina befriended Heleta. Chetniks are two faced, they gain trust of other people quickly and pretend to be nice. And then they start feeding their victims all these lies, just ad they fed the World lies that 700,000 Chetniks died in Jasenovac. Shaina, you are dead wrong about Heleta. Period.
Sorry for my outburst of anger. That's the exact effect that Savo Heleta and his Chetnik father Slavko Heleta have on me every time I talk about them.
Regarding my mention of the Jasenovac lies. We all know by now that the figure of 700,000 Serbs is a lie. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,
"Among the victims were: between 45,000 and 52,000 Serb residents of the so-called Independent State of Croatia; between 8,000 and 20,000 Jews; between 8,000 and 15,000 Roma (Gypsies); and between 5,000 and 12,000 ethnic Croats and Muslims, who were political and religious opponents of the regime."
Also, in 1998, the Bosniak Institute published SFR Yugoslavia's final List of war victims from the Jasenovac camp (created in 1992). The list contained the names of 49,602 victims at Jasenovac, including 26,170 Serbs, 8,121 Jews, 5,900 Croats, 1471 Romanies, 787 Muslims (nationality unknown), 6,792 of unidentifiable ethnicity, and some listed simply as "others".
Thanks for publishing the list of books. I finished "To know where he lies", and I would def. recommend it. It is also one of those books that will probably appeal to not only those who are interested in Bosnia and Srebrenica in particular, but also anthropology, the role of science and tech in post-war recovery and other related issues.
About my "piece of propaganda" by Dr. James Lyon from the International Crisis Group:
"Savo Heleta's account of life in pre-war and war-time Bosnia, and his experiences as a minority Serb in the besieged Muslim enclave of war-time Gorazde is a gripping and compelling story of the nobility of good and the banality of evil.
"Through the eyes of young Savo we watch the collapse of human moral values under the onslaught of hatred, propaganda, desperation and lies, while also seeing the attempts by some to maintain their humanity in the face of overwhelming odds. It is a fascinating piece of memoir literature from Bosnia that is certain to outrage the reader, while at the same time offering an exciting narrative."
The Scar in the Stone - anthology of poems edited by Chris Agee
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